Fast teams expect to finish fast.

"With the right metrics, you're acknowledging that the entire business competes on speed," says Ray Blair, IBM's director of e-procurement. "Can you take a product and get it to market faster than anyone else? That's what the game is about, every time."

Sidebar: Faster Meetings

Talk about time management! The members of IBM's Speed Team were charged with balancing their regular responsibilities with team-related tasks that could very well consume a hefty chunk of their day. So, when it came to meetings, they didn't want to waste a minute. A set of rules quickly evolved to govern the Speed Team's gatherings. "The nature of the people on this team is that they're always thinking about acceleration," says Ray Blair, the team's coleader.

Here are the five rules that Blair and his team followed to conduct faster meetings.

Do your homework.

Every meeting required some preparation work on the part of attendees. There were documents to read and issues to consider, so that team members could reach decisions more quickly once they convened.

Focus fast.

Although the Speed Team's mandate was broad, Blair made sure that meetings were structured and that they stayed on topic. Email and other electronic mediums were used to explore possibilities and to bounce ideas off of other team members; the face-to-face meetings were intended to keep the project's momentum strong.

Make fast work of the peripheral issues.

"Sidebar" matters that arose during meetings and seemed to warrant further discussion were handled later in conference calls by a small subset of the full group.

Don't mind your manners.

Politeness wasn't required. "Anyone could just say, 'Move on,' or 'Go to the next point,' " explains Blair. "Ninety percent of the time, everyone in the room was already in agreement with the speaker anyway. By allowing people not to mind their manners, we were able to cover a lot more ground."

Encourage fast follow-up.

Meeting notes would be compiled immediately and posted to a database within an hour, so that team members would have a clear idea of what steps to take next. "You wouldn't want the embarrassment of being called the Speed Team and doing things slowly," Blair says. "Everything about the meetings and about the follow-up was designed to move things forward."