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Project management, ended correct is a godsend to any firm. It gives you a openly stated ambition, metrics for how to accomplish it, and a time and plan for how to realize the target with financial plans for labor costs, development and prototypes, and bringing it to market.

There are two cases from the sporting paraphernalia discipline that highlight project management, one optimistically one unconstructively. We'll be embracing these examples from our latest project management training in tandem, as a comparison and difference so that you can find out accurate project management procedures without driving your workforce nuts, or wrecking your product release announcement.

The two products are for distinct sports (cycling and hockey), but that shouldn't discourage you from understanding the lessons needed from them.

First, both manufacturers looked to product studies of their existing customers to taste and find out unmet user needs. In the branch of cycling, there have been lots of information on harm to men caused by poorly produced cycling seats - they hamper blood flow to the groin and set off aches and can even set off harm to the erectile tissues, if not properly adjusted. There's firm medical literature confirming this, and the investigations showed that, among male competitive cyclists, that this was something of a worry.

The product assessments for the hockey equipment manufacturers was more uncomplicated - was it achievable to plot the methods that have given golf clubs improved driving range (with carbon fiber, and precisely composed heads) to hockey sticks? Evaluations of their potential customers indicated there was a strong need for this.

Where the cycling corporation and hockey stick producers differed in their primary assessments was in defining their end ambitions. The hockey stick producers understood that since there was a constructive indication for the product, that just developing it would be a lucrative product launch - they didn't take the time to calculate what a successful 'super stick' would do and be for their customers. The cycling company started out with a straightforward aspiration - 'Make the most comfortable bicycle seat, contoured for the male anatomy, that can be done.'

Both groups spent time and money exploring materials science. The cycling gear firm looked into closed cell versus open cell foam, seat coverage, and more. They put feelers into the Bermudas of cyclists and put them on conventional bicycle seats to see where the stress points were, and they put motion capture feelers on the cyclists to see what the 'usual posture' was when riding a bicycle at several exertion degrees - rolling along on a horizontal has a different posture than cornering rigidly in a criterium, versus going up hard on a road race stage.

The hockey stick producer made a fault by inventing the stick and assuming that the records from a golf swing (which uses a wider traverse of curve) would map over to a hockey stick. While they harvested various working information from authority and collegiate hockey players, they predominantly went with what was known, and upgraded the materials along the lines of high end golf clubs. The result was a stick with a much more inflexible pole and a blade with a exceptionally quirky sweet spot.

By contrast, the cycle seat company had identified ways to remake the front of the seat, so that the weight of the cyclist was dispersed along the hip bones and tail bone, instead through the pubic bone. Their opening prototypes got complaints that there was unsatisfactory power transfer to the legs while sitting down - the separate lengths of the femur and tibia mean that the amount of power that's transferred in a pedaling motion changes as the angle on the forward sprockets changes. So they put back a number of the strengthening construction but changed the shape of it, so that the groin area got support without being, well, crushed or numbed by repetitive exercise.

As the hockey stick manufacturers sent their high-priced trial products out, the trial products got met with lackluster replies. The sticks had, in the expression of the players, a 'dead feel' to them - they didn't transmit the sensation of the puck from the blade up the shaft as well as normal wooden and fiberglass sticks did. Moreover the attempts to make a standardized sweet spot went completely awry, for the reason that the hockey players have, since the days of wooden sticks, taped and bowed the blades of their sticks for customized handling techniques, and it's a very custom-made. The high density carbon fiber heads couldn't be bent without them delaminating (something that produced looks of horror when the delaminated samples were sent back to the firm!) and taping them tended to, in the words of one team member result in a 'I'm hitting the puck with a slab of bologna.' as a response. In essence the firm had managed to make a correctly designed hockey stick, for one player, who had the playing quality they'd modeled the new stick from.

The end result of these two different tactics to customer feedback ended in very different product development processes; the hockey stick firm found out that their work to date had been pointless - for the reason that they didn't ask the proper questions of their customer base. The cycling seat company attuned their product in response to user testing, and developed a method for determining victory that was compliant enough to take mid course rectifications.

As you can see from these different case studies, project management is crucially imperative to the development of any project, and the key to project management is preserving suppleness during the development process to control the unpredicted results of tests, next to with having an end user driven model of what constitutes success.

More resources on project management training for the sporting equipment industry