The first pillar of LevelOps' Operational Excellence framework: why AI success starts with people. Clear roles, the right skills, accountability.
The first pillar of the LevelOps Operational Excellence framework for AI success is Team. Not technology. Not tools. People.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast. If your people aren't aligned, no strategy or technology will save you. This is especially true for AI implementations, which require organizational buy-in, clear ownership, and a willingness to work differently.
High-performing teams have clear accountability, everyone knows what they own and how their work will be measured. They have trust, both in leadership direction and in each other's execution. And they operate in a culture that values results over effort, what you achieve matters more than how busy you appear.
Would you re-hire every member of your team today? And are you leveraging their unique strengths to the fullest? These are uncomfortable questions, but they're the right ones to ask before investing in AI.
Next up in this series: Pillar 2, Process. How clear and aligned are your ways of working?
Maxime Lavoie
Founder & CEO, LevelOps
Industrial engineer by training. Former Deloitte supply-chain consultant. Former VP Operations at Goodfood Market. Now writes the ERP, MRP and B2B order playbooks he wishes had existed in 2018.
Operations
LevelOps' Operational Excellence framework for AI success: Team, Process, and Tools. Before bringing in AI, get the fundamentals right.
Operations
The second pillar of LevelOps' Operational Excellence framework: building clear, aligned, and measurable processes before automating anything.
Operations
Key insights from Maxime Lavoie's Stratégies PME 2025 presentation. How top-performing SMEs use strategic clarity, discipline, and data.
Everyone can say what they own and how that work will be measured, without asking. On an order desk that means one named owner for order intake rather than a shared inbox everybody half watches. Ambiguity about ownership tends to surface later as a missed order nobody thought was theirs.
Because it forces an honest read on alignment before you spend money on technology. The question is uncomfortable on purpose, and the answer tells you whether you are about to hand new tools to a team that is set up to use them. The paired question matters as much: are you using each person's strengths fully.
It treats buy-in as a precondition rather than something to manage after rollout, because a team that does not trust the direction will not adopt the change. It helps that order automation of this kind does not remove the person. Orders arrive as Shopify draft orders that someone still reviews and approves, so the work moves from typing to checking.
It means judging the desk on orders processed and errors avoided rather than on how full the day looked. Keying an order by hand takes about six minutes and looks like visible effort, but the business only cares about accurate orders going out the door. Once you measure the outcome, being busy stops standing in for performance.
Not necessarily. This pillar asks for clear roles, the right skills and accountability, and most teams find they have the skills but not the clarity. Start by naming owners and checking whether you are leveraging the strengths of the people already there.
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