During Quarterly Planning, our leadership team consistently struggles to distinguish between everyday job accountabilities and true Rocks, resulting in Rocks that are either ordinary operational duties or multi-quarter monsters. How do we properly qualify a 90-day Rock?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Leadership teams fail at Rock setting because they confuse standard job roles with quarterly priorities, or they attempt to compress multi-year transformations into single quarters. A Rock is not your day job, and it is not a vague corporate aspiration. A Rock is a specific, priority project that takes between 30 and 90 days to complete and moves the company toward its 1-Year Plan.

To qualify every proposed Rock during Quarterly Planning, run it through four strict filters:

First, is it already part of your five primary roles on the Accountability Chart? If the proposed Rock is hitting monthly sales quotas or running client payroll, reject it immediately. That is standard operational execution. A Rock must be a distinct project that improves capability, eliminates a bottleneck, or builds an asset.

Second, can it be completed 100 percent within the upcoming quarter? If the scope involves completely replacing your ERP system, that is not a single Rock. Break it down. Quarter one is vendor selection and contract signature. Quarter two is data migration. Quarter three is user testing and rollout.

Third, is it specific, measurable, and attainable? Avoid Rocks titled Improve Customer Service. Title it Implement automated customer ticketing system with first-response time under two hours.

Fourth, is there a single owner? A Rock cannot belong to a committee. One seat on the Accountability Chart owns the result.

Before concluding Quarterly Planning, require each owner to state their exact definition of done. If the leadership team cannot visualize what complete looks like by day 90, the Rock is not ready for the list.