Faster Company

Fast Talk: It's about Time

After examining many fast-moving projects, including e-procurement, the Speed Team began outlining what those projects had in common. It then created the "Success Factors for Speed," six attributes that all successful projects had in common: strong leaders, team members who were speed demons, clear objectives, a strong communication system, a carefully tailored process (rather than a one-size-fits-all approach), and a speed-oriented timetable.

Put simply, the Speed Team found that going faster is all about how you relate to time. If you treat time as a tangible resource, as you do money and people -- the traditional metrics of performance -- then naturally, you'll wind up moving faster. "Like most big companies, IBM tends to measure such things as reliability and cost," says Blair. "We ask questions like 'How long will this application last? How much downtime can we expect? What will it cost to get it up and running?' But if you want something done fast," he continues, "you need to ask different question: 'What does this save you? What kind of advantage does it give you? How many transactions are being done electronically, versus over the phone or by fax?' And of course, 'How long did it take to do it?' "

So the team started compiling time-saving recommendations in two categories: quick hits that could make a difference right away and long-term initiatives that would require changes in policies, procedures, and perhaps even values. The team's suggestions, while urgent, were also delivered with a sense of humility. Blair and Harper emphasized that their group was offering examples of what people could do to eliminate speed bumps and move faster. It was likely, they said, that even better ideas would come from other members of Ward's leadership council and from the IT group as a whole.

"Too often, initiatives are delivered by a voice from above," says Blair. "You're asking people who are doing their jobs correctly to start thinking about something new -- speed."

The Speed Team decided that it needed a medium for gathering fast feedback -- a democratic forum for soliciting ideas from non-Speed Team IBMers. The group seized upon the Web as the right tool for that forum. In early January, the Speed Team held a weeklong online "town hall" meeting. The goal was to encourage other employees to "open up and discuss what's wrong and what opportunities exist," explains Karen Ughetta, the meeting's coordinator.

Visitors to the online town-hall site were greeted with an audio clip of Steve Ward explaining the Speed Team's mission and underscoring its high-level support, as well as an essay titled "The Speed Imperative," which, recalls Ughetta, "described what the Speed Team was all about -- and what we mean by 'speed.' A lot of people hear that word and think that we want them to keep doing the same thing, only faster, harder, and for longer hours. But we're really about getting people to change the way that they do things, about blowing up the process and discussing ways to avoid speed bumps."

Some of the suggestions that began to fill the message boards of the online town hall overlapped with ideas that the Speed Team had already developed. Town-hall participants confirmed the Speed Team's opinion that many projects wound up in the breakdown lane because of overly rigorous measurement.

"People complained about breaking down 13-week projects into 13 phases and having to produce measurement reports at the end of each week," says Ughetta. But there were also plenty of fresh observations. "One thing that the Speed Team hadn't talked about," she continues, "was how information overload can slow people down. Newsletters, email, and the intranet can create lots of duplication and mixed messages. We discovered, through the online town hall, a need to focus and funnel information to people, rather than pointing the fire hose at them."

Race to the Finish?

In the early months of this year, the Speed Team began implementing both its "quick hits" and its long-term initiatives. But even the longest of the long-term actions, according to Ward, was set to extend for only 90 days. The best ideas, by design, were those that could be implemented quickly.

Quick hits included things like creating a "speed rating" for employee-performance reviews and getting all leaders, from Ward on down, to articulate more clearly their time-oriented priorities. Long-term initiatives involved addressing the occasional disconnect between finance-department employees who supervise the funding of company projects and those employees who actually run those projects. It's an age-old trade-off: time versus money. "Often, by the time a project gets to the deployment stage," says Dan Forno, 49, a Speed Team member and vice president of business information solutions at IBM Global Services, "the money needed to complete that project has been cut. So we wanted to make sure that the finance department was more connected to our projects and to our priorities."