Fast teams lead to fast results when a few skilled workers join hands to serve customers. Kelvin F Cross, in this article, suggests a few strategies to form customer-centered fast teams and achieve high-performance. When I first worked with companies to conduct major reengineering projects, they tended to take six to nine months from analysis, through design, to implementing the new process. And after all that work, regardless of industry, many of the designs came out nearly the samestreamlined processes enabled by customer-centric self-managed teams. So now, with this experience, we have helped fundamental redesigns take as little as six weeks to accomplish the same thing.

No one likes waste, but sometimes it is difficult to see and eliminate. People may be busy, and not realize they are unproductive. However, when convened in the same room, a small team of workers, each representing a different function, or part of the process, can uncover the waste. Let's look at an oversimplified example of how people can be busy but not productive. Picture a large dinner table with ten people, four people on each side and one on each end. Now assume the person at the head of the table says, "Pass the salt, please." Now assume that the salt shaker is at the opposite end and everyone participates in moving the salt from one end of the table to the other. The salt would take a long time to meander its way through a total of nine hand offs. Now assume, at another table. four people on one side of the table are busy passing the pepper. Therefore, only four people are available on the other side of the table to participate in moving the salt. The total hand-offs are reduced to five and the time is reduced to half. In addition the people on the other side are productivethey are passing the pepper