The minimum viable capture plan
Four questions, one table. Why most capture plans collapse under their own weight, and the stripped-down version small and mid-size teams actually use.
A capture plan is supposed to be the document that makes the rest of the proposal process efficient. For most teams, it’s the document that makes the rest of the proposal process feel bureaucratic. Teams pull up the Shipley capture-plan template, see 14 sections, close it, and go back to writing the draft.
The root of the problem: capture plans were designed for multi-million-dollar federal pursuits with multi-month capture windows, and the ceremony has been imported into 10-person shops pursuing 150-thousand-dollar state contracts with three-week windows. Capture plans that don’t fit the shop get skipped; shops that skip them lose bids they could have won. The answer is not “do the big version or don’t do capture.” It is “do the right-sized version.”
This is the minimum viable capture plan I use with small and mid-size teams. Four questions and one table. It fits on a page. It can be drafted in 30 minutes. It does the load-bearing work that matters for every pursuit, and it leaves the extended Shipley apparatus available for the pursuits that earn it.
Four questions
Question 1 — What is this buyer actually trying to do?
Not “what does the RFP say they want.” What strategic initiative is this procurement part of.
A state government RFP for case-management software isn’t about case-management software. It’s about a political commitment the agency head made in the last legislative session, or a federal grant the agency won that requires a specific implementation milestone, or a performance metric the governor’s office is watching. Every RFP is a means to an end that is not written inside the RFP.
If you cannot name the end in one sentence, you have not done capture yet.
Sources for the end: the agency’s published strategic plan, the funding source (check federal grant databases), the incumbent vendor’s last contract performance report, the buyer’s press releases in the last 18 months, and — when possible — a direct conversation with anyone on the buyer side.
Question 2 — Who decides, and who influences?
Every RFP has an evaluation panel. Every panel has a center of gravity. Who on the panel does the rest of the panel defer to? Who asked the loudest for this procurement to happen? Who is the executive sponsor whose name doesn’t appear on the panel but who will read the recommendation before signing?
Names are the goal. Where names are unavailable, roles. An RFP that is evaluated by the agency’s CIO, CISO, contracts officer, and operations director has a different center of gravity than one evaluated by the CFO, the legal lead, and three program managers. The same response drafted for both panels under-serves at least one of them.
Question 3 — What is the incumbent’s current weakness?
On re-competes, this is the only question that matters. The incumbent is providing a service; the service has known gaps; the evaluation panel has opinions about those gaps. A response that names one specific gap the incumbent is currently demonstrating — without attacking the incumbent personally — is differentiating. A response that omits it is a response the incumbent could have written.
On first-time pursuits with no incumbent, the question becomes: who is the implied incumbent? What is the buyer doing now instead of buying from someone? A state doing case management in spreadsheets has a spreadsheet as its incumbent. The weakness of the incumbent is the weakness of the spreadsheet.
Question 4 — What is the one thing we will not compete on?
Every pursuit has an axis the team cannot win on. Price, or geographic presence, or a certification the team doesn’t have, or a reference the team cannot produce. Naming the axis early prevents the draft from accidentally trying to win on it.
A team that is not going to be the cheapest should not let the word “value” appear in the draft without a second pass. A team that does not have the relevant certification should not write as if it might — the evaluator will check.
This is the question that feels defeatist and isn’t. You are not declaring weakness. You are declaring focus.
One table — the win-theme map
The four questions above produce the intelligence. The table turns it into an operating artifact the drafters can read without rereading the narrative.
| Win theme | Evidence | Where it appears |
|---|---|---|
| Theme 1 — one declarative sentence | A specific metric, case, or proof the team can cite | Technical §3.2, Management §4.1, Past Perf §6 |
| Theme 2 — one declarative sentence | A specific metric, case, or proof | Technical §3.4, Executive Summary, Pricing §5.2 |
| Theme 3 — one declarative sentence | A specific metric, case, or proof | Management §4.3, Past Perf §6.1 |
Three themes. Each with evidence the team can actually produce, not evidence the team hopes exists. Each mapped to the RFP sections where it will show up. If a theme cannot be mapped to at least two sections, it is a slogan, not a theme.
The APMP Body of Knowledge and the Shipley Proposal Guide both have extended capture-plan templates that build on this foundation. The four-question-plus-table version is not a replacement for them. It is the entry point for teams who currently have no capture discipline and want something they will actually use.
Why this works when the 14-section version doesn’t
Three reasons.
First, every question has an owner. “What is this buyer actually trying to do” is one question with one answer. Thirty minutes of research produces the answer. The 14-section Shipley template has 30-plus questions, most of which no single person on a small team can answer on their own, which means the plan either gets drafted in a two-hour meeting no one has budget for, or it doesn’t get drafted at all.
Second, the output is operational. The three-row table goes directly into the drafting brief. Drafters read it. It changes the drafts they write. A 14-section narrative capture plan rarely makes it past the proposal manager’s desk, and doesn’t shape the drafts the way it was supposed to.
Third, the plan is cheap enough that it gets done. A plan that is expensive to create is a plan that is created for high-value pursuits and skipped for everything else. The expensive-plan model systematically under-invests in the bids a small team wins most of — the mid-dollar, mid-complexity pursuits where capture discipline is the whole edge.
Where this version breaks
It breaks on federal pursuits above the $5M band, on re-competes with entrenched incumbents where the decision politics are more important than the content, and on procurements with evaluation panels above about eight people. Those cases need the full Shipley apparatus: stakeholder maps, influence diagrams, competitive analyses, price-to-win modeling. The four-question version is an under-specification there.
It also breaks on pursuits where the team has done no prior work with the buyer and has no relationships to source intelligence through. Capture is asymmetric by design — teams with incumbency or with pre-existing relationships have more to work with. A team with nothing but the RFP text cannot fully answer question 2. It can answer it partially, and the gaps in the answer become the capture work for next time.
The Bid Lab has written convincingly about how Shipley’s process is too heavy outside massive internal teams. The same logic applies to capture plans. Import the discipline. Do not import the ceremony.
The takeaway
Four questions, one table. Thirty minutes. Every pursuit. The minimum viable version becomes the habit; the habit becomes the operational muscle that, on the pursuits that earn it, scales up to the full plan.
The capture stage in the eight-stage pipeline is where most small-team responses either win or write themselves into invisibility. The plan is the artifact that decides which.