Integrations often depend on the customer’s IT team, a third party system or an approval process that can take months, so a pilot that depends on them can stall for reasons nobody in the pilot can fix. The pilot then gets judged on delays rather than on whether the tool works.
The better approach is to set milestones around what the pilot team can control, like converting procedures, running jobs and gathering feedback, and to treat integrations as a parallel track with its own timeline. Manual imports or file transfers can fill the gap until the integration is approved.