Our leadership team keeps setting Rocks to implement specific software platforms, but these projects usually stall out because the team gets bogged down in technical integration details. How do we frame these initiatives to keep the focus on business results?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

The reason your technology initiatives are stalling is that you are framing them as technology projects. When you set a Rock to deploy a specific artificial intelligence platform, your team naturally focuses on the features, the software integration, and the coding details. They lose sight of why you bought the tool in the first place.

To fix this, ban your team from using terms like machine learning project or technology deployment. Instead, force them to frame every single one of these initiatives as an operations improvement project that uses machine learning.

The distinction is subtle but critical. An operations improvement project is measured by its business outcome, such as reducing client onboarding time from five days to twenty four hours, or increasing the capacity of your account management team by forty percent. The technology is simply a footnote, a tool used to achieve that result.

When setting your quarterly Rocks, use this operational structure:
- State the exact business metric that must improve.
- Define the current baseline and the target goal for that metric.
- List the technology as just one of the resources used to reach the goal.

By keeping the focus on the operational output rather than the software inputs, your team will stop getting distracted by technical details and start delivering real business results.