There were other long-term issues -- for example, baseline measurements: How fast is fast enough? "What's the difference between making good time and making great time, when it comes to getting a Web site deployed?" asks Jane Harper. "Is two months good time, or is two weeks good time?" Forno worked with the IT team's deployment experts to determine how long it should take, on average, for an application such as a Web site to be rolled out to a group of users within IBM. If you want to race faster, suggests the Speed Team, set some expectations for how long it should take to cross the finish line.

One of the legacies of the Speed Team is a communications program designed to illustrate the power of speed in action. The program features lots of examples of blazingly fast projects that emphasize the importance of pursuing speed through teamwork, clear goals, and work processes that are tailored to the individual project. The central message: In the era of e-business, every company has to move faster than ever before. And IBM, having catapulted the term "e-business" into the mainstream, is bound by honor to remain the world's leading example of a fast-moving e-business. IBM can't just walk its talk. It has to run its talk.

The Speed Team will hold its final meeting in June. But its members, along with CIO Ward, are convinced that the end of the Speed Team as an officially sanctioned unit won't mean the end of its influence inside IBM. "These people will work together for years, whether you call them the Speed Team or not," Ward says. And by getting executives and rank-and-file employees throughout the IT team to think about flattening speed bumps, Ray Blair says, members of the Speed Team, and those who contributed ideas to it, have begun to think of themselves as "part of the solution -- part of the community that comes up with ideas for getting rid of speed bumps and part of the formula for getting things done faster."

"Our evidence of success is that our changes have been adopted by the organization," Blair continues. "People have begun to think about the need for speed in their work. We're no longer necessary. Our job was to be catalysts, and catalysts can't linger around."

Meanwhile, Ward is already thinking about the next team that he'll create from his leadership council. As the clock runs out on the Speed Team, he muses about the many small, scrappy, Internet-savvy competitors that IBM must confront and how IBM can leverage its powerful brand and its global infrastructure to compete more effectively with the competition. It sounds as though perhaps the Momentum Team will be Ward's sequel to the Speed Team: "Momentum is speed times mass," he says, "and we need as much momentum as we can get."

Scott Kirsner (kirsner@worldnet.att.net), a Fast Company contributing editor, is based in Boston's North End. He works fast. For more information on IBM's Speed Team, contact Jane Harper by email (jh@us.ibm.com).

Sidebar: How to Stay Fast

The Speed Team examined an array of projects within IBM that had progressed more quickly than usual and then identified six shared characteristics that it dubbed the "Success Factors for Speed." Says Jane Harper, director of Internet technology and operations: "None of our discoveries were great revelations, but we felt that outlining them would help other teams focus on the things that could speed up their projects." Fast teams have strong leaders. Leaders of IBM's fast teams viewed their job as twofold: They were responsible for keeping the team focused on its goals and for knocking any barriers out of the way. You can't go fast without knowing where you're going and having the determination to get there.

Fast teams need speed demons.

Fast-moving teams don't just draft talented people; they draft the right kind of talented people -- people with a mix of skills, experience, and tenure at the company.

Fast teams need clear goals.

"Team members need ultraclear priorities in order to work fast," says Steve Ward, IBM's chief information officer and VP of business transformation. "You need to say, 'Our goal is to sell $2 billion a month on the Web,' and then work with our team to achieve that goal."

Fast teams thrive on fast talk.

Instant messaging, teleconferencing, and videoconferenceing form a foundation for teamwork. An ability to minimize administrative overhead -- and to deal with the overhead that couldn't be eliminated -- was also a common thread among IBM's fastest-moving teams.

Fast teams make fast adjustments.

You can't have good quality without strict processes. But, says Harper, IBM's fast-paced projects were staffed with people who tended to act "within the spirit of the process, not by the letter of it. If you're a smart cook, you don't have to measure every teaspoon of salt; you just take a few pinches."