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This is part 13 of a 20-part blog series designed to help you win government oral presentations. To read the previous blogs, click here to find the index. In this blog, you'll learn how to effectively manage and navigate color team reviews. From understanding the roles of reviewers to implementing strategies like “Keep, Follow, Focus, Remember, and Defend,” this blog will provide an orals team the tools to keep reviews productive, aligned, and on track.  

Formal Review Teams

When the Deck Boss determines that the deck is over 80 percent complete, schedule a formal, full review of the deck as a whole. Before or concurrent with the review, especially if you have not been doing iterative reviews, I strongly recommend a compliance check to ensure nothing has been dropped or left out during development.  

Proposal reviews are often structured as an iterative process, referred to as color teams, to ensure content is reviewed by people other than the writers. The proposal and deck color team reviews involve two primary types of reviewers: Technical Reviewers (subject matter experts) and Thematic Reviewers (senior-level reviewers with substantial review experience). Technical Reviewers review for technical accuracy, clarity, comprehensiveness, and readability. Thematic reviewers review for overall tone, continuity, and consistent messaging. The most common “color teams” are Blue (detailed outline), Pink (80 percent draft), Red (95 percent draft), and White Glove (final review).  

The review results must be adjudicated, distributed to the team, and integrated into the deck. 

Increasing Color Team Review Productivity 

At their best, formal deck reviews by company leadership confirm the approach, add important information, and support the Deck Boss in getting the resources needed to complete the deck. At their worst, these meetings can rack nerves, increase workloads, cause confusion, and sometimes create needless changes in direction, content, and the overall approach.  

Successful color team reviews start with the correct mindset. Most proposal managers and deck leads think they are building a deck with the “right answer,” and if reviewers leave negative comments, they must have the “wrong” answer. In some limited cases, there may be inaccurate information on a chart that a color team reviewer, looking at it with fresh eyes, might catch. For the most part, however, you are NOT trying to build the “right answer”. The truth is, there are no “right answers” or, more accurately, there are hundreds of ways of giving the right answer to the government’s question. In fact, the solicitation gives clear direction on what a right answer may look like. Usually, creating a compliant deck that has a correct answer takes a couple of hours (as covered in Blog 11: Static Presentation Deck Development Part 2: Developing a Compliant Outline).

Color teams do something very different than correcting the presentation to make it “right”. Color teams develop agreement over time that this is the deck you will present to the government. In the end, you want the color team to agree that the deck answers the question and is good enough to represent your team and win. When you accept that the goal of the color team is to get agreement, then you can formulate a strategy to get agreement that works in your favor. I’ve seen proposal managers who understand agreement skillfully navigate color teams, while others who want the “right answers" often have to repeatedly redo the presentation. 

To improve your chances of a successful review, I recommend the five color team guidelines: Keep, Follow, Remember, Defend, and Focus.

Keep

Keep the same reviewers throughout the process. This allows institutional knowledge to build over time and for decisions made in a prior review to hold.  

Follow 

Follow the process. Start by getting agreement on an outline, and do not skip ahead until you have agreement on it. Use a mid-development (Pink Team) review or many agile reviews to maintain agreement on decisions made in the outline phase.  

Focus 

Focus the review team on specific issues and concerns for feedback. If there are sections that passed the review last time, do not waste time on them in a future review. Instead, ask the team to foucs on sections that need the most work. Tell them exactly where you need them to focus and what feedback you need. The most successful reviews are when reviewers are focused on specific slides so that all the slides are reviewed for accuracy, relevancy, and merit.

Remember  

Remember and communicate decisions made in prior reviews. Keep a running log of decisions and their impact and present them before every review. This simple step dramatically reduces the tendency for a color team to change directions multiple times.  

Defend  

At some point in the process, usually during the final review (White Glove), I recommend defending the deck to avoid having to make any last-minute changes. Defending does not mean taking criticism personally, nor does it mean getting into an argument in a meeting. Defending means putting forward the rationale for the choices made while also reminding the color team of prior decisions, issues, and the impact of making a change to the deck late in the process. Unfortunately, color teams often include senior leaders who can impact the careers of the proposal team, making defending feel risky.  

How to Manage a Color Team Focused On The Presentation 

Using the concepts of Keep, Follow, Remember, Focus, and Defend, managing color teams to reach agreement and achieve the results you want becomes much easier. Every color team has the same participants, and you have followed a rigorous approval and feedback process, so agreement has been built by default. Add a brief to every color team at the beginning of the meeting that reviews all prior decisions and explains why they were made. This puts into the review team’s working memory why decisions were made, prevents unproductive repetitive conversations, and further builds agreement.  

Further manage your color team for agreement by focusing them on specific questions to answer. I like “how” questions, such as “How can we improve the impact of section 2.1 and what examples would work best there?” This question ensures the writers get the information they need to finish the section. Imagine how pointless it would be to ask a “does” question. For example, “Does section 2.1 have enough impact?" This elicits only a yes or no answer and forces the writer to guess what the answer will be. Even when the proposal manager knows that the section doesn’t have enough impact, they will ask this question, making it totally useless. 

Adjudicating Color Team Feedback 

At some point, you will bring all the input from the color team reviewers together. I recommend meeting with each reviewer individually to field the comments. When reviewers meet as a group, there tends to be group think, with the most senior reviewer taking over, and no one wants to disagree with them. When you get feedback separately and then follow up with each individual separately to show that the feedback made a difference in the deck, then the next review will go much more easily. Simply creating the perception that the reviewer’s feedback was accepted can sometimes be enough to get the agreement needed.  

Fielding and adjudicating feedback on a deck can sometimes be very tricky. Unlike in Microsoft Word documents, where track changes allows for quick adjudication, PowerPoint presentations do not manage changes and comments well, and it is easy to miss them, delete them, and copy over them. This gives even more reason to talk to reviewers individually.  

Now that you have completed your last color team review, it is time to move into the endgame phase of deck development.  

EndGame (The Last 3 to 5 Days) 

One of my favorite quotes from a proposal team came during the last three days of static presentation development, when the deadline to submit the final version to the government loomed. Late in the evening, we had just completed yet another review with leadership, had our notes on the changes, and started adjudicating them. The PM looked at me with a half grin and said, “The time for committee decision-making just ended!” She was right. No more deck reviews and no more “happy to glad” changes. After a few minutes, she adjudicated the comments, a fancy word for deciding what to keep and what to disregard from the review. We made a few changes that she considered practical and prudent with three days left, and we submitted the deck on time.  

While we do not frequently have time to do it, if you can fit in a full rehearsal of the final draft with the presentation team, I recommend you do. The rehearsal will give the team one last time to find content issues with the slides. They will do a better job of scouring the deck for issues than any White Glove.  

White Glove the Deck 

It is time for a “white glove” final review of the deck. I recommend using a conference room and inviting everyone to come when they can over a few-hour period to conduct a deck “wall walk.” Print the entire presentation and tape each slide at about eye level on the walls. Reviewing documents on your feet, on paper, and seeing all the slides at once changes things up quite a bit. During the white glove, if I'm in charge of deck development, I sit in the room on my computer, keep the deck configuration, and do not let anyone else have access to the deck. I watch as the reviewers come in, review the deck, and make changes in red ink directly on the slides on the wall. I pull down the slides with the changes, evaluate them with the PM, make the changes directly in the presentation, and print and put up the new slide on the wall. These reviews always find small nits, typos, and inconsistencies that all the other reviews and the team's tired eyes missed during endgame agile reviews. In today’s remote environment, it is not always possible to have everyone available to conduct a wall walk. Even when we're not in the same room, I still recommend a dedicated wall walk where you assemble a group of reviewers and walk through every slide together on a virtual call. This will be a multi-hour event, as everyone needs to review the same slide together. The deck boss, or lead for the wall walk, should present the slide and make live edits to the deck during the virtual wall walk. Teams often underestimate how long a White Glove wall walk takes, so allocate more time than you think necessary (a rough estimate would be 5 minutes per slide).  

Trident Support 

Identifying the ideal reviewers for iterative color team reviews can make a huge difference in your overall deck. Color team reviewers often come in with fresh eyes and can ask questions in a way that helps the team see it from the government’s perspective. Keeping a log of decisions that are made throughout the process will help as reviewers are added/removed during the duration of the proposal. Just as you would build for a written response, ensure you have enough time for iterative reviews before submission. Need help building an orals calendar or color team reviews to ensure a smooth process? Contact Trident. With our dedicated PMs, deck bosses, third-party compliance checks, and expert orals coaches, Trident can position your team for success.  

• Don’t miss blog 14: Presentation Development Pitfalls 

Written by Jeff Everage  

Jeff is the President and Founder of Trident Proposal Management. As a GovCon Oral Presentation Coach for more than 15 years, Jeff has coached more than 100 teams to success. His insights into oral coaching, gained from the trenches of coaching, are designed to support you and your team in your efforts. As a Navy veteran, Jeff resides in Southern California and provides support to clients worldwide as part of our globally dispersed team.