Go/No-Go Scorecard
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A go/no-go scorecard is a weighted decision matrix that AEC marketing and BD teams use to evaluate a specific opportunity against predetermined criteria before committing pursuit resources.
Why weighting matters more than the criteria themselves
Most firms converge on similar evaluation categories: client relationship strength, project type fit, geographic reach, team availability, fee potential, and competitive exposure. The differentiator is how those categories are weighted relative to each other. A firm that weights "incumbent relationship" at 30% of the total score is making an explicit strategic claim that relationship proximity outranks technical fit, which is a defensible position in QBS-driven public sector work governed by the Brooks Act but may be the wrong call in design-build procurements where team composition drives shortlist decisions. Firms that use equal weighting across all criteria are not being objective; they are hiding a strategic choice behind an arithmetic one. The non-obvious trap is that a scorecard with too many criteria (anything above twelve) tends to compress all scores toward the middle, which defeats the purpose entirely.
Where the scorecard fits in the actual pursuit workflow
The scorecard should trigger at first notice of an opportunity, before any RFQ or RFP has been issued, because the decisions that happen in that window, including whether to start relationship-building, whether to position a specific project manager, whether to begin a teaming conversation, are exactly what a go/no-go is designed to inform. Running a scorecard after an RFP drops is not go/no-go decision-making; it is rationalization. In practice, the score itself is rarely the final word: a BD director who has cultivated a client contact for three years will override a marginal score, and that is appropriate. What the scorecard does is force that override to be explicit rather than silent, which creates a record for debrief analysis and hit rate tracking later.
The common failure mode and what fixes it
Scorecards decay. A firm builds one during a strategic planning retreat, uses it consistently for six months, then watches it drift into a formality that the team fills out after the decision is already made. This happens because the criteria are not connected to the firm's actual win data: if your three-year debrief record shows that opportunities scored below 65% have a win rate under 8%, that threshold becomes defensible and hard to dismiss. Without that feedback loop, the scorecard is an opinion poll formatted as math. Kantiv closes this loop by connecting pursuit intake data to historical project and client records, so the context that informs a score, prior work with that client, team availability, recent competitive losses to the same shortlist pool, is drawn from verified institutional knowledge rather than whoever is in the room that day.
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