We provide a systematic analysis of the physical generation of single- and two-qubit quantum operations from Hamiltonians available in various quantum systems for scalable quantum information processing. We show that generation of one-qubit operations can be transformed into a steering problem on the Bloch sphere, whereas the two-qubit problem can be generally transformed into a steering problem in a tetrahedron representing all the local equivalence classes of two-qubit operations (the Weyl chamber). We use this approach to investigate several physical examples for the generation of two-qubit operations. The steering approach provides useful guidance for the realization of various quantum computation schemes.