Most high-tech companies divide projects between two groups: a customer-focused sales-and-marketing team and an internally focused engineering team. Intel's program-office approach ignores old boundaries and reassigns territories. Engineers become partners with sales-and-marketing people -- a cross-fertilization that yields real benefits. Engineers gain a marketer's sense of which Web features are important to customers. At the same time, marketers don't pitch products that Intel engineers can't build. Says Morris: "Now our businesspeople can say to our engineers, 'I have an idea for a new feature, but I want to know whether it's going to be easy or hard for you guys to do.' They learn to look for ideas that have the lowest technical impact and the highest customer impact."
Constant action. At the core of rolling implementation is seamless activity, which Intel achieves with a nonstop stream of meetings. At the outset of the Internet rollout project, for example, the program office held a "Map Day," during which it laid out overall goals and communicated what those goals would require from each group. "Map Day is the first time that all of the groups gather and everyone hears about the project's ramifications on everyone else's area of expertise," says Morris. "Mostly, what you find out is everything that you don't know yet."
As the project develops, the meetings continue. The program office hosts regular Go - No Go sessions, at which group leaders report their status on mission-critical tasks. And weekly -- or, during the project's final stages, daily -- each group holds a GOST ("get our stuff together") meeting, during which members discuss progress and obstacles, ask questions, and, if need be, send up a help flare.
According to Morris, Intel workers dislike meetings as much as most people do, so the company has developed techniques for running meetings that are themselves models of effectiveness. For Map Day and Go - No Go meetings, team leaders determine what will be discussed. More important, participants aren't penalized for saying things that others don't want to hear. "Honesty is critical," says Morris. "People need to see that when they say they've got a 'no go,' the response isn't 'Why not?' but 'What do you need?' "
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