The federal Q1 push: triaging three RFPs at once

Federal Q1 — October through December — is the period when the new fiscal year’s procurement money lands and solicitations clear at unusual rates. Vendors regularly see two or three relevant solicitations drop on the same day. The temptation is to read each one carefully, in order. The right move is to triage all three in the same 90-minute window.

Here is the drill.

The 90-minute window

Block 90 minutes the same day three solicitations land. Not later in the week. Same day. The cost of delay is the cost of capture work that does not happen — competitors are reading the same documents tonight, and if your team is one day behind on bid/no-bid, you are also one day behind on the pre-bid Q&A window.

In the 90 minutes, you do not draft anything. You do not start a compliance matrix. You do not call SMEs. The 90 minutes is decision-only.

The four questions per bid

For each of the three solicitations, answer these four questions in writing:

1. Is the scoring methodology best-value tradeoff or LPTA? This determines the response shape entirely. (See the procurement-lead reading post for the full discipline; the short version is that LPTA bids are won on price, best-value bids are won on technical narrative, and the two require different staffing decisions.)
2. Is the past-performance bar one we can clear? Specifically, can we name three references at the required scope and dollar value, with reachable points of contact? If not, the bid is a no-bid regardless of technical fit.
3. Is there an incumbent, and how visible are they in the requirements? Hyper-specific requirements that match exactly one product, or past-performance language that reads like the incumbent’s resume, are the clearest signal that the vehicle is wired. Two or more red-flag patterns push the bid toward no-bid.
4. What is the response window relative to the scope? A 60-day window for a 200-page response is workable. A 21-day window for the same scope means the agency has either an aggressive timeline or an incumbent who has been shadow-writing.

Four questions, ten minutes per bid, three bids. That is half the window. The other half is the synthesis.

The three buckets

Sort the three bids into one of three buckets:

Bucket A — bid, with full capture. The scoring favors us, the past-performance bar is clearable, and the response window is workable. Schedule the kickoff for the next business day.

Bucket B — bid, with reduced effort. The scoring is borderline or the past-performance bar is reachable but not strong. Bid as a learning exercise or to maintain visibility with the agency, but with capped effort — fewer SME hours, no executive write-time, an explicit ceiling on the B&P budget. The bid proceeds; the team treats it as the third priority, not the first.

Bucket C — no-bid. Two or more red flags, or the past-performance bar is not clearable. Write the no-bid memo with a one-paragraph rationale. The memo gets filed in the proposal record. Nine months from now when the same agency posts a similar vehicle, the memo is the input to the next bid/no-bid decision.

The discipline is that every bid lands in a bucket. Not “we will decide later.” Bucket assignment happens in the 90-minute window, in writing.

What you save

The 90-minute drill is expensive in concentration and cheap in calendar time. The save is on the back end — bids that should have been no-bids do not enter the production queue, capture work starts the next morning on the bids that survive triage, and the team’s Q1 capacity goes to bids that have a real chance.

For the pillar treatment of this discipline — bid/no-bid as a deliberate decision against a written framework — see our scoring rubric draft. The 90-minute drill is the operational implementation of that rubric under time pressure. When three solicitations land in the same morning, the rubric is what keeps the decision honest.