The Lotus F1 team has finished fifth on the Formula One racing circuit for the past two years. Now they're driving toward a championship within the next couple of years, Hackland says. There's "an outside chance" the team could take it this year, Lotus Ambassador Emerson Fittipaldi has said.

In , 12 teams compete in 20 races every two weeks in cities around the world between March and November. Each team designs and builds its own car. Some specifications and rules change every year. In 2014, for example, turbocharged engines and new fuel-flow restrictions will be mandated. Lotus F1 is working on those long-term designs. But the team is also focused on the minute-by-minute rush of racing today. For Hackland, that means pumping out faster and more sophisticated analytics tools to give the team an edge.

Half of his 14-member IT group is dedicated to software development. Even so, the traditional waterfall development method the team's developers had been using could get slow, he says. Gather requirements, create a functional specification, create a technical specification, build and test. The ultimate users of the system were involved mainly at the beginning and end, but not during the whole process.

Yet it's all that time in between when small corrections and additions can occur that make the end product much better, says Visitacion at Forrester. "When you see something tangible faster, it creates a stronger sense of reality of what's going to be valuable to you and what's going to be extraneous. It allows the team to focus on the essence of the project."

Under Lotus F1's new agile approach, users attend daily meetings with developers and look at progress every three weeks. Testers are involved all the way through. "By the time we deliver, there's been a huge amount of interaction, which we never used to have," Hackland says.