Every organization has a version of this story.

A major initiative gets approved. Leadership is excited. The team is capable. The technology is selected. Everyone agrees it needs to happen soon. A kickoff meeting gets scheduled, a group chat gets created, and the work begins.

Six months later, the project is behind. Nobody is quite sure how it got there. The implementation partner is waiting on decisions that haven't been made. Staff are managing their regular workload plus the project, which means neither is getting full attention. The executive director is fielding questions she doesn't have answers to. The operations lead is building spreadsheets to track things that should have been tracked from the beginning.

We’ve all experienced the specific kind of friction that comes after a period away from a project. Whether it’s a planned vacation, a sudden shift in available resources, or a longer transition like parental leave, the challenge is always the same. You sit down to pick up the thread and spend the first several hours just trying to remember where you left off. You aren't just restarting the work; you are trying to reconstruct your own logic. 

In my own backyard each spring, the transition from winter dormancy to new growth is a recurring reminder of a fundamental truth in consulting: You cannot rush the season of preparation. At Clearly Consulting, we are gardeners—both in our personal lives and in the work we do with our clients. Every year, I start in the dreaded phase of gardening. I’m out in the yard surveying the damage and prepping the beds. It’s back-breaking, dusty work—digging through packed clay, pulling up what didn’t survive, and adding nutrients back into the soil.

Project management is exactly the same. Everyone wants to talk about the planting—the shiny new software, the Go-Live party, and the beautiful dashboard. But nobody wants to spend weeks in the soil doing the hard work. However, if the soil is poor, the most expensive seed in the world won’t grow.

Here is how to navigate your own season of preparation to ensure your organization can sustain long-term growth.

At Clearly Consulting, we see nonprofit leaders facing their own "Olympic" challenges every day—whether it’s a massive CRM migration, a global website overhaul, or a total digital transformation. The stakes are high, the resources are lean, and the complexity is daunting.

How do you beat the odds and ensure your big project reaches the finish line? Here are four lessons from the Olympic chapter of How to Get Big Things Done that you can apply to your 2026 roadmap.

In the whirlwind of nonprofit technology projects, the ambition is often grand. We aim to implement systems that transform operations, scale impact, and ultimately, better serve our missions. But as many of us know, "big things" come with big challenges. That's why I've found invaluable insights in Bent Flyvbjerg's book, "How to Get Big Things Done." It's not specifically about tech, but its core tenets resonate deeply with the complexities we face in the nonprofit technology landscape.

I've recommended this book to many colleagues, and today, I want to share some key takeaways that can help us all navigate those ambitious "big things" in our nonprofit tech initiatives.

For Clearly Consulting, 2025 was about growing our team and expertise while staying laser-focused on our mission: guiding organizations through their most critical transformations and turning complexity into efficiency. The journey was challenging—like scaling a mountain—but incredibly rewarding. Ending the year stronger than we started is a powerful achievement that confirms our approach to strategic project guidance works. As we look ahead, we’re sharing our top 10 accomplishments of the year, which represent strategic shifts that strengthened our expertise and capacity to serve you better.

Confession time: While I spend my days immersed in the intricacies of nonprofit technology projects, a part of me has always been captivated by the sheer logistical brilliance of "The Amazing Race." Imagine orchestrating a global adventure, moving teams across continents, designing challenges, and keeping it all running smoothly! It's a project manager's dream (or maybe a delightful nightmare?), and indulging in this "what if" scenario actually reveals some surprisingly practical lessons for the work we do every day in the nonprofit tech world.

Family vacation planning is not that dissimilar to technology project planning - involving your stakeholders can be the difference between a success or a flop. Let’s take a closer look at how to do this well.

Unfortunately, time and again I have seen amazing teams with skilled Project Managers fail at achieving their project goals.

At Clearly Consulting, we focus on “Practical Project Management,” partnering closely with each client to customize a plan for organizational change that avoids these pitfalls. It’s not one size fits all; every team’s needs are different, and our job is to listen and understand exactly what is needed for your successful transformation.