What is a colour team review?

A colour team review gives a group of reviewers a single purpose at a single stage of the bid. The term belongs to bid and proposal management, where each colour marks a different stage and purpose. Some organisations add black hat and green to the usual four.

How colour team reviews work on one bid

Colour team reviews (color team reviews in US spelling) run as a sequence on a single bid. Each review is held by people who did not write what they are reading, and the writers revise on their findings before the next review begins. The Association of Proposal Management Professionals (APMP) lists pink, red and gold reviews as a step in developing a bid or proposal, held for iterative improvement.

The example that follows is illustrative. A supplier is responding to a multi-section services tender, and its bid manager has planned four reviews, from blue to gold.

Blue team

A blue team review tests the win strategy before writing starts. On the illustrative bid, reviewers read the capture plan and the draft win themes. They ask whether the themes answer what the buyer has said it needs, and whether the supplier's case against its rivals holds up. The writers then start from an outline that carries only the themes the blue team accepted.

Pink team

Pink team means the early review of a bid's outline, storyboard or first draft against the buyer's requirements. On the illustrative bid, the pink team reads each section's storyboard alongside the compliance matrix and the award criteria. It looks for requirements with no planned answer, sections that misread the question and evidence that is promised but not yet found. Changes at this stage move headings and evidence rather than finished prose.

Red team

A red team review, also called a proposal red team, reads the complete draft and scores it as the buyer's evaluators would. Here, reviewers mark each section against the award criteria and weightings, note where it would drop marks and say what would lift it. The review sits late, on a near-finished response, with time left for the writers to revise before gold.

Gold team

A gold team review is the last read of the final, priced response before sign-off. On this bid, a senior reviewer checks that the price, the commitments in the text and the compliance matrix agree. The same reviewer confirms that the red team's findings have been dealt with. After gold, the response goes to the bid manager for sign-off.

Where colour team reviews sit in the bid process

Colour team reviews sit between the decision to bid and submission. They begin after the go/no-go decision and the kick-off, and the last of them ends before the response is prepared for submission. In the bid management process APMP describes, review milestones are set during bid planning, next to the milestones for writing and submission. Each colour therefore has its date in the bid plan. It sits on the tender timeline with room after it for the writers to revise.

The same process model puts final formatting, quality assurance and compliance checks under submission, a stage after development. Gold is the last review inside development, so it comes before those checks. The gold team reviews what the response says and what it prices, and the final checks then test the finished document before it goes to the buyer.

Why the colours differ between organisations

The colours are a convention rather than a standard, so their names, their order and what each one checks differ between organisations and guides. BSI's bid and proposal management code of practice, PAS 360:2023, says it is not intended to recommend proprietary methodologies. The colours a team uses therefore come from its own practice and the guides it follows.

The set of colours also changes. Some teams add black hat for competitors and green for price. Others call each review by what it checks rather than by a colour.

Who sits on each colour team

Each colour team is made up of people outside the writing team, chosen for what that review checks. The bid manager plans the reviews and gives the final sign-off, while the writers act on the reviewers’ report rather than judge their own work.

Blue draws on senior people who know the buyer and the opportunity, such as the account lead and a bid director. Pink brings in subject matter experts to check that the planned answers are technically sound and complete. Red relies on reviewers who have not seen the draft, so they read it cold, as an evaluator would. Gold involves senior approvers who can commit the organisation to the price and terms.

How a colour team review differs from similar terms

A colour team review is one staged form of proposal review. It shares only its name with red teaming in IT security.

Proposal review

Proposal review is the general term for any read of a bid by someone other than its writer, from a single peer check to a full sequence of reviews. Colour team reviews are the staged form, with several planned reviews, each holding its own colour, stage and purpose. Every colour team review is a proposal review, but a proposal review need not belong to a colour sequence.

Red teaming in IT security

In IT security, a red team is a group authorised to act as a likely attacker and test an organisation's security defences through attempted attacks and exploits, as the NIST glossary defines it. That red team attacks systems, while a proposal red team reads and scores a draft response. A supplier answering a security questionnaire can meet both terms on one bid, and they describe unrelated work.