A technical volume is not read the way you wrote it. A reviewer opens it with a scoring sheet, works down the evaluation criteria the solicitation lists, and assigns points to each one. So the most useful structural decision you can make is simple: arrange the document so that every criterion on that sheet has an obvious, labeled home, and the reviewer never has to hunt for it.

The order most agencies expect

The names differ by agency; the sequence rarely does.

  • Problem and significance. What is broken, for whom, and what it costs them. Two or three paragraphs, not two pages.
  • Innovation. What you are proposing, what it improves on, and why it is not obvious.
  • Technical objectives. A short numbered list of what this phase will establish.
  • Background and state of the art. Prior approaches, competing methods, and where they fall short.
  • Technical approach. The core section: architecture, methods, calculations, materials, test methods.
  • Work plan. Tasks with owners, durations, dependencies, and go/no-go points.
  • Preliminary results. Whatever you have already built, measured, or modeled.
  • Team, facilities, consultants and subawards. Who does the work and where.

If the solicitation prescribes its own outline, and many do, follow it literally, including its headings and their order. Deviating from a prescribed structure is the cheapest possible way to lose points, and at some agencies a formatting violation is an administrative rejection before a technical reviewer ever sees the file. The application guide covers the surrounding forms and volumes; page limits, fonts and margins are set by the current solicitation and nowhere else.

Mirror the evaluation criteria

Take the criteria list out of the solicitation and put it beside your outline. If a criterion reads "soundness of the proposed technical approach," a reviewer should be able to scan your headings and land on one containing that phrase. Headings such as "Discussion" or "Our Method" force the reader to reconstruct your logic under time pressure, and reconstruction produces middling scores.

Weak: "Section 4: Development Work." Strong: "Section 4: Technical Approach and Feasibility of the Proposed Sensing Method." The second one costs nothing and tells the scorer they have arrived. Where a criterion spans two sections, say so in a single cross-reference sentence rather than repeating the content. Panels are described in more detail in our piece on how review panels score proposals, and the criteria weightings themselves shift between agencies and between phases.

What does not belong in it

Three things get misplaced constantly. Budget justification belongs in the budget forms, not in the middle of your approach. The commercialization material belongs in its own volume where the agency asks for one, and it is a different argument entirely, covered in the commercialization plan. And company history, funding rounds and awards belong nowhere in the technical volume at all. Phase II work also belongs only in the brief forward-looking paragraph the solicitation invites, since scope differs sharply between the phases as described in Phase I versus Phase II.

Projects House helps hardware founders turn engineering work into a technical volume a reviewer can score. Send us the concept through the contact form.