PWin scoring now lives inside gate reviews, with weighted categories your team configures once and scores on every pursuit.
Every capture team already has a PWin number. It usually lives in a spreadsheet one person maintains, gets rebuilt from memory before each gate review, and never quite matches what anyone says out loud in the meeting. PWin Scoring moves that model into GovDash, where the score is calculated from what your team actually rated and the history stays attached to the opportunity.
What's live
- A PWin tab in capture plan templates, where you set your rating scale, weighted categories, and score bands
- A PWin tab in gate reviews, where the pursuit gets scored
- A PWin widget on the opportunity overview, charting the score phase over phase
- Score bands that turn a percentage into a recommendation: No-Bid, Watch, or Pursue
- Category and question sliders, so scoring happens during the review instead of after it
What PWin is
PWin is probability of win: if you bid this, how likely are you to win it.
That is a different question from whether you should bid at all, and the two get used interchangeably more often than they should. PWin is an input to the bid decision, not the decision itself. A 70% PWin on work you cannot staff is still a no-bid.
The number matters because bidding is expensive. A serious proposal costs real labor, real consultants, and real time, all of it out of a B&P budget that runs out. Most bids lose. The worst outcome in government contracting is not losing a bid, it is spending six months and a large share of your B&P on something you were never going to win.
Gate reviews exist to prevent that. PWin is what frames the decision at each gate.
How the score is calculated
You define the four to six categories that actually determine whether you win. Customer relationship, competitive position, incumbency status, teaming strength, solution fit, past performance, and price competitiveness are the ones that come up most. The default template ships with a starting set you can edit.
Each category gets a weight. The weights total 100%. If they do not, GovDash tells you before you save.
On an opportunity, your team rates each category on the scale you chose, either 0 to 5 or 0 to 10. The platform converts each rating to a percentage of the maximum, multiplies by the weight, and adds the contributions.
A category scored 4 out of 5 at a weight of 25 contributes 20 points. Four categories scored that way produce a PWin of 63.75%, and your score bands turn that into Watch.
Why we built this
Ask ten capture managers for a PWin and you get ten different methods, most of them a feeling with a percentage attached. Weighted scoring models produce more consistent results than informal aggregation, which is why most mature capture organizations eventually build one. Then they build it in a spreadsheet, because there was nowhere else to put it.
This came from customers. Teams asked for weighted, scored questions that roll into a calculated PWin and live inside the gate review instead of a separate export. Several wanted the score to recalculate at every pipeline stage, so the number reflects what they know now rather than what they guessed at intake. Others wanted to weigh a whole category rather than each question inside it. The model is built from those requests.
Calculating PWin on a spreadsheet can fail in three ways:
Everyone scores 50%. Optimism bias applied evenly. It inflates the revenue forecast and spreads B&P across pursuits that should have been killed at the first gate.
The score never moves. Set at intake and never revisited, it becomes a label instead of a decision.
The score gets reverse engineered. Somebody has already decided to bid, so the inputs get nudged until the output agrees. This is the one a well built system can actually prevent, by making every input visible and the history permanent.
Teams were also already trying to do this inside GovDash with custom fields and formula fields. That works for simple math and breaks the moment you need several weighted questions rolling into a category, and several categories rolling into one score.
What you can do with it
Score during the review. The PWin tab sits inside the gate review. Move the sliders while the discussion is happening and the summary row updates live: overall score, recommendation, strongest category, weakest category.
Know what to fix. The total tells you where you stand. The category breakdown tells you what to do. At 55% with customer relationship as your weakest category, the next phase's capture plan writes itself. Go meet the customer.
Watch the number move. The overview widget charts PWin phase over phase. A pursuit that climbed from 35% to 58% after two months of customer contact looks very different from one sitting at 60% since intake because nobody has touched it.
Make the gate mean something. The failure mode of gate reviews is that every gate says advance. When the recommendation reads No-Bid and the weakest category is on screen in front of leadership, folding early gets easier, which is the entire reason to run gates.
Setting it up
- Open a capture plan template in Capture settings
- Go to the PWin tab
- Set your rating scale, 0 to 5 or 0 to 10
- Adjust your score bands. Defaults are No-Bid 0 to 33%, Watch 34 to 66%, Pursue 67 to 100%
- Edit the categories, set weights totaling 100%, and choose which capture phase each becomes scorable in. Competitive position may not be worth scoring at opportunity assessment, but it decides things at the bid/no-bid gate.
- Link capture questions to categories so the evidence sits next to the rating
Phases follow whatever gate structure your team already runs, from a lean three-gate process to the full Shipley lifecycle. Template changes are written to team activity, so you can see who changed the model and when.
Learn More or watch how to come up with a PWIN score below.
FAQs
What is PWin in government contracting?PWin is probability of win, a single percentage estimating how likely you are to win a contract if you bid it. Capture teams use it to decide which pursuits deserve a budget and which to walk away from.
How do you calculate PWin?The standard method is a weighted scoring model. Pick the four to six factors that decide your wins, assign each a weight totaling 100, score each factor on a fixed scale, then convert and add the contributions. A factor scored 4 out of 5 at a weight of 25 contributes 20 points.
What is a good PWin score?It depends on your thresholds, which is why teams set score bands. A common split is no-bid below 33%, watch from 34% to 66%, and pursue above 67%. Be suspicious of anything near certainty. GovDash caps the calculated score at 94%, because no pursuit is a sure thing.
How often should PWin be updated?At every gate. A score set at intake and never revisited is a label, not a decision. The point of rescoring is that you know more now than you did.
Can we use different models for different types of work?
Yes. PWin configuration lives on the capture plan template, so a services pursuit and a products pursuit can score against different categories and weights.
Book a demo now to see PWin scoring inside a live gate review.