Key observations from Gartner’s CRM Summit, held last week in Florida:

• Up to 25% of CRM implementations in 2008 will be postponed due to human resource shortages.
• Staff turnover makes long implementation times, often on the order of a year, highly vulnerable to loss of key players and consequent restart of key portions of the effort

Developer productivity, with radical shortening of the time from idea to application deployment, is therefore becoming a more non-linear issue than ever. If a process takes a month, you’ll hit the target before it moves; if it takes a quarter, you may still have the team that you started with to do Release 2.0; if it takes a year, you may never get out of prototype mode. Elevate the priority of Getting [Stuff] Done.