Faster Company

By the time you read this, the Speed Team at IBM will have just about raced right out of existence. It has been a brief -- but intense -- journey. Last November, during dinner with some members of his nearly 200-person leadership council, Steve Ward, VP of business transformation and chief information officer at IBM, decided that saving time -- making decisions faster, writing software faster, completing projects faster -- needed "to be much higher up on the agenda." To the hungry startups that were gnawing at the edges of IBM's businesses, working in Internet time seemed as natural as, well, sitting through review meetings did to veteran IBMers. Ward was worried that if IBM didn't reset its clock, those startups would clean its clock.

"One of the things that frustrates me the most," says Ward, 45, "is the length of time between the 'aha' moment and the moment when you actually start changing the organization's direction, getting it to where it needs to be."

The length of time between Ward's "aha" moment and his first action was less than eight hours. The morning after the leadership-council dinner, the Speed Team was born. Ward summoned 21 IBMers and gave them a simple assignment: Get the IT group -- a staggering 100,000 people worldwide -- moving faster than ever, with a focus on the fast development of Web-oriented applications. It was a huge responsibility. Unlike many companies, in which the IT group is considered a cost center and reports to the CFO, IBM's IT team is considered so crucial to the company's fortunes that Ward reports to J. Bruce Harreld, IBM's senior vice president of strategy and one of CEO Lou Gerstner's closest confidants. Translation: The Speed Team was going to be operating in the corporate fast lane.

The team's coleaders -- Jane Harper, 45, director of Internet technology and operations, and Ray Blair, 45, director of e-procurement -- had strong reputations for pushing projects forward at a blazing pace. After talking to Ward about their mandate, the two leaders decided that the team should have a finite life span -- roughly six months. "I think that we will have failed if the Speed Team is still together three years from now," explains Harper. "Our plan, when we started this, was to come together, look at what works, look at why projects get bogged down, create some great recommendations about how to achieve speed, get executive buy-in, and try to make those recommendations part of the fabric of the business."

Watch Out for Speed Bumps

Steve Ward built the Speed Team with IBM employees who had led groundbreaking projects that were completed in an unusually short amount of time. Karen Ughetta, 43, an IBMer based in Raleigh, North Carolina, earned a spot on the team because of her work on e-community, a Web-based platform that encourages collaboration among various teams. Gina Poole, 39, founder of developerWorks, a Web site launched last September to help IBM forge stronger relationships with software companies, was drafted for how quickly she'd gotten that site up and running.

Since the group was made up of people who had been associated with success stories, it decided to use those stories to begin its efforts: What were the shared characteristics of fast-moving projects within IBM? "Every day, we do really good things in this company," says Harper. "We wanted to know why some projects happened more quickly than others. Then we wanted to look at those slower projects and ask, 'What were the barriers to speed?' We started calling those barriers 'speed bumps.' "

Members of the Speed Team talked about how they had managed to avoid speed bumps in their own projects. Blair, for example, had devised a set of Web-based systems known within IBM as e-procurement. Starting from ground zero in early 1998, he created processes that enabled IBM employees to use the Web to search for lower airfares and to find ways for IBM to work with its partners to ensure that the company was getting the lowest possible price on parts. As Blair was building those applications, he found that many of the rules governing application development at IBM "were bound to slow things down." Those rules had been created with perfectly good intentions -- mainly, to keep the quality of the company's software high -- but few of them distinguished between different kinds of software projects. "One size just doesn't fit all," Blair says. "But we had a single process that all applications went through, whether they were simple or complex. We had to tailor the process to each project."

Blair worked with his supervisors to leapfrog several steps of the official application-development process, and by the time his e-procurement project was one year old, he had moved a remarkable $1.8 billion worth of IBM's purchasing to the Web -- and had saved the company $80 million in the process. This year, he predicts that the company will save about $250 million. The speedy creation of e-procurement has accelerated life in other parts of the company as well. Thanks to e-procurement, the turnaround time for approving purchase requisitions is down from 2 weeks to 24 hours.