The daily morning dog walks in my Portland neighborhood would make me believe that folks around here could feed themselves (and then some) with the fruit trees, the berry bushes of every variety, the edible plants growing from any available space and the raised beds thick with greens, tomatoes and more. Always a gardener myself—I remember planting my first bush beans in a small rock garden at age five—the mild winters and temperate summers of this part of the Pacific Northwest have elevated my seasonal hobby into a near obsession to plant, grow and harvest every possible inch of our tiny urban lot.

Until this summer, my wife and I had always been “buy it and try it” sort of gardeners. Sure, we have a reasonably good sense of what will probably do well based on temperature, sunlight, watering needs. But the “buy it and try it” approach can end up with as many failures as successes, it seems. Why did I think the broccoli should go in the back of that bed, crowded out by the kale and chard and starved for sun? Hopefully I’ll remember that for next time.

But this year in our new city and our new house, we decided to take a long view of things. After all, we want to be here for quite a while. And we figured we should do things with a plan and a time table that, while not necessarily immediately gratifying in every sense, will ultimately be more satisfying—and more fruitful—than our usual approach.

So we hired, much to my surprise and eventual delight, landscape designers. In my walks I saw landscape work that I liked and tracked down the designers, worked with them to develop a plan and a budget, then revised the plan to meet our real budget, and ultimately got the help we needed. We had small walls of dry-stacked stone built, had many of the plants we crowded into tiny areas last fall moved to better locations and had a mix of berry bushes, herbs, and hardy (and climate appropriate) grasses and other flowering plants dug into the new mulch and organic fertilizer that the designers added to our yard.

The result is…fantastic. But in looking at the garden again this morning, I realized that it’ll be for a couple of years until the garden will really come in to its own—for it to be as productive and beautiful as it is in my mind right now.

And, being a bit more of a geek than a gardener, this whole process struck me as a perfect metaphor for how technology projects should also work.

I’ve seen more than my share of technology projects that never worked right or never lived up to their potential. Usually, the reasons for these less than satisfying outcomes include not doing proper planning, not funding the project appropriately, not bringing in the right help or not being able to sustain the project over time.

Planning

Without a good plan, how do you know when a technology project has achieved its desired outcomes? How do you know that you’ve selected the right tools, implemented the right systems? Without planning that takes into account the concerns of your stakeholders—your staff, board, clients, constituents, etc.—how do you know that your technology project will meet their needs? Just as with our garden plan, a plan that helped articulate our immediate and long term goals (no more mowing the lawn, plenty of edibles, pretty stuff to look at, low maintenance, etc.), a technology plan will lay out an organization’s goals and help define the steps to reach those goals.

Funding

“Budget to the plan, don’t plan to the budget” sounds great when you put it in quotes, but often isn’t realistic—I don’t know of many nonprofits with unlimited resources. However, it is better to create the best plan you can and then decide what you can afford (and what can be handled in later phases) rather than limit the planning process to a fixed budget. Budgeting to a plan also allows for more creativity in the budget (if we did this part now we could leverage those resources which would give us money over here to do this) versus planning to a budget (this machine + that software = budget and therefore the plan).

So, while I really wanted more mature plans in my garden this year, we decided on smaller (and cheaper) plants now so that in two or three years we’ll have the garden that we wanted that included the beautiful dry-stacked stone wall, rather than a garden that was smaller or didn’t have a wall or something else that would never had made it into the plan if we started from the dollar signs first. And we decided we could get the old plants out ourselves and use that money on something else and so on.

Getting the Help You Need

We could have designed and built our own garden, but it wouldn’t have turned out like this garden. Similarly, plenty of organizations can (and do) create their own websites, databases, etc. And for some groups and some projects that is absolutely fine. But for others…well, we’ve seen those websites, struggled with those databases, rebuilt those servers.

There is a reason that people specialize in a particular subject matter—we can’t all be expert brain surgeons or landscape designers or website developers. It is great to be excited about a specialty that isn’t your own or to take advantage of an outside interest or skill for the benefit of your organization, but nonprofits shouldn’t count on that. Website developers tend to build better websites than grassroots environmental activists because they are website developers and that is what they do—build websites. The landscape designers we worked with did, without question, a much better job on our garden than we ever could have. And they did a better job not just because it is what they do, but because they are also good at listening, at helping plan, at working with a budget, and at encouraging us to help—when and how it was appropriate to do so.

Sustainability

Technology systems are almost always meant to last for some meaningful period of time. The longer, usually, the better. To get the most out of a technology tool or system, and to make it last as long as possible, usually requires occasional or ongoing maintenance, training, support, upgrades, etc. Whether that means defragmenting a computer’s hard drive or adding new fields or tables to a database or training a new staff member on updating the website, all technology investments must be supported over time. Knowing this up front and attempting to budget for these ongoing investments is key to getting the most productive value from that investment. Sometimes, knowing this might mean spending more up front—on warranties or better equipment or more features. Or it might mean building in more time and resources for the system in an on-going way—training for users, planned upgrade budgets, maintenance and support contracts, etc.

Sure, for an extra $1500 we could have had the entire garden area built with a built-in watering system. Or, for about $100, we decided instead we could get some different hoses, sprinklers and timers—and to spend more of our own time maintaining and nurturing our gardens. If we knew that we couldn’t allocate our time to that maintenance, spending the extra money up front could have been a good investment. By doing the watering manually, we helped keep the project within our budget, but it will take more time to sustain that initial investment and there are now other variables that could cause the garden to eventually fail or not reach its full potential—our lack of time or plain old laziness.

In this situation, though, I believe we’ve accurately assessed our commitment to the outcomes of the project—a beautiful garden full of flowers and berries and other edible delights—and so we’ll put in the effort and our garden will, I hope, flourish. With proper planning, budget, support and commitment over time, so too can the investments our organizations make in technology.