Faster delivery was crucial because "turnaround time" was almost an oxymoron for the IS group.

Take the task of writing a date routine: A simple computer program was designed to analyze a worker’s compensation claim based on the date it was filed and helped determine the injured worker’s eligibility and benefits. Programmers had to painstakingly hand-code the routine and transfer information from dozens of hard-copy manuals—a process that could take two weeks. Add four weeks for unit, system and acceptance testing, and a date routine could eat up six weeks of valuable time. And since programmers were unaware of what other projects IS employees were working on, it was difficult to know whether coworkers had information that might help save time. "The left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing," says Sooknanan, "and you could extrapolate that to the entire organization."

Under growing pressure to respond more rapidly to problems and improve its customer service, the IS department formed a rapid accelerated development (RAD) branch in 1994. The group used an approach called time boxing: completing application development projects in phases—from thought to installation—in nine months. Delivering products to customers faster called for finding new ways to gain efficiency, so the group came up with the concept of gathering harvestables—documentation of previous projects that programmers could refer to when writing application code. Adamo reduced time spent on analysis when creating code from scratch by training IS employees to first look for existing information, such as application code that had already been tested and proven so that they could simply copy and revise it. Thus, writing a date routine could be completed in a couple of hours instead of six weeks.

The idea proved practical, and the RAD group’s selection of intellectual capital soon expanded from application code to include best practices, project templates, customer-selection criteria, standards and guidelines. The group then built a rudimentary Lotus Notes database to house this growing collection. New challenges quickly arose, however. IS employees found it difficult to reuse an item from the repository without consulting the creator for one thing. And IS project team members focused so intensely on the customer during projects that it was difficult to find face-to-face time to exchange knowledge with other IS workers.

The RAD group solved these problems by building TeamWorX—a virtual team environment based on Lotus Notes. The tool vastly decreased the learning curve and recursive work of new team members and allowed them to get up to speed on an entire project in a couple of days by simply following and reading discussion threads. IS teams also began using TeamWorX to record how and why they had made decisions.