Color team review software for Pink, Red and Gold Teams

In ProposalWorkspace a review is a deadline on the proposal. The deadline types include review milestones for Pink, Red, Gold and Final Team, each with a date, a time and a time zone that the whole team sees, and any milestone can be marked critical.

Reminders take care of themselves: in the three days before each review, the proposal owner and the active proposal team get a daily reminder email, and if the date moves, the team is told. The dashboard calendar and each person's task list show what is due, so a review is not something people hear about the morning of.

Plan the reviews backward from the due date. A Red Team needs a complete draft and time afterward to fix what it finds, so most teams leave several working days between the Red Team and the Gold Team, and the schedule makes that gap visible to everyone before the writing starts.

Reviewers get their own roles among the 42 federal proposal roles (White, Pink, Red, Gold and Blue Team Reviewer, plus Internal Reviewer and Contracts/Legal Reviewer), and outside reviewers can join as guests: view-only by default, with edit access if the owner grants it, and an expiry date. How it is set up: color team reviews in the docs.

The hardest part of a Red Team is reading against the evaluation criteria instead of for style. During a review, the AI can score a drafted section against its row in the compliance matrix, acting as a source selection evaluator: a score from 0 to 100, a Pass, Warning or Fail, the reasoning behind it, and a suggested compliance status for the row.

Another check runs over the whole matrix at once: every requirement row is checked against the written proposal and reported as answered (with the section where it was found) or not addressed in the proposal. A missing requirement is the kind of finding that costs the most points and is the easiest to miss by reading alone.

The scores help reviewers spend their time on judgment (is the approach convincing, are the strengths clear, are the discriminators visible) instead of hunting for missing requirements. They are a second reader, not the decision; the reviewers and the proposal manager decide what changes.

The last review is the one that cannot be skipped. For a final RFP proposal, Gate 4 (Final Check & Sign-off) asks someone who did NOT write the proposal to read the final draft and sign off. Their name and the time are recorded, the sign-off can be withdrawn, and until it is given the proposal cannot move to submission.

Teams that finish in Microsoft Word get twelve checks in the Word add-in over the open document, grouped as blockers, risks and polish: page limits against each section's limit, tracked changes and comments left in the file, required forms, formatting against the checklist's rules, requirement coverage, unbacked claims, an amendment not yet folded in, win-theme coverage, placeholders, acronyms, document metadata and readability.

Then export each volume to Word or PDF and submit. Running the rest of the bid (the schedule, owners and partner inputs) is covered on proposal management software.