Past performance
Past performance is the evaluated record of how a vendor executed similar prior contracts — scope, scale, outcomes, and reference verification. In federal and formal procurement it is often a standalone scored volume, and 'similar' is defined by the solicitation, not the vendor.
Past performance answers the evaluator's real question: not 'can anyone do this' but 'has this vendor done this, at this size, for someone like us.' Strong past-performance write-ups follow a tight pattern — contract identity, scope summary in the buyer's vocabulary, relevance mapping to the current requirement, measurable outcomes, and a named reference who will confirm it. Federal evaluation formalizes this (relevance and recency windows, CPARS records); commercial buyers apply the same logic informally through references. The maintenance burden is real: outcomes data, contacts, and metrics age, which is why past-performance material belongs in the maintained knowledge base rather than in last year's proposal file.
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