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Project management, finished right is a benefit to any organization. It gives you a clearly stated goal, metrics for how to reach it, and a time and plan for how to meet the target with resources for labor costs, growth and prototypes, and bringing it to market.

There are two examples from the sporting paraphernalia domain that bring to light project management, one positively one in the negative. We'll be dealing with these examples from our latest project management training in tandem, as a comparison and difference so that you can study appropriate project management methods without driving your workforce nuts, or wrecking your product release announcement.

The two goods are for dissimilar sports (cycling and hockey), but that shouldn't dissuade you from finding out the lessons needed from them.

First, both producers looked to product investigations of their existing clientele to test and clarify unmet customer wishes. In the sphere of cycling, there have been lots of information on harm to men caused by bad shaped cycling seats - they hamper blood flow to the groin and trigger aches and can even trigger harm to the erectile tissues, if not well adjusted. There's sound medical literature supporting this, and the investigations indicated that, amid male competitive cyclists, that this was something of a matter.

The product surveys for the hockey equipment manufacturers was more clear-cut - was it doable to chart the practices that have given golf clubs superior driving range (with carbon fiber, and thoroughly well-adjusted heads) to hockey sticks? Surveys of their potential clients indicated there was a clear need for this.

Where the cycling corporation and hockey stick makers diverged in their initial evaluations was in defining their end goals. The hockey stick makers believed that since there was a optimistic indication for the product, that merely developing it would be a thriving product launch - they didn't take the time to consider what a winning 'super stick' would do and be for their clientele. The cycling company started out with a straightforward goal - 'Make the most comfortable bicycle seat, contoured for the male anatomy, that can be done.'

Both parties spent time and money exploring materials science. The cycling stuff company looked into closed cell versus open cell foam, seat coverage, and more. They put feelers into the shorts of cyclists and put them on usual 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 intensities - rolling along on a flat has a different posture than cornering harshly in a criterium, versus going up hard on a road race stage.

The hockey stick firm made a fault by designing the stick and believing that the figures from a golf swing (which uses a wider traverse of arch) would map over to a hockey stick. As they gathered various running facts from pro and collegiate hockey players, they predominantly went with what was known, and upgraded the materials along the lines of high end golf clubs. The conclusion was a stick with a much more rigid bar and a blade with a enormously quirky sweet spot.

By contrast, the cycle seat manufacturer had recognized ways to redesign the front of the seat, so that the mass of the cyclist was distributed along the hip bones and tail bone, instead through the pubic bone. Their original trial products got complaints that there was insufficient power transfer to the legs while sitting down - the separate lengths of the femur and tibia mean that the quantity of energy that's transmitted in a pedaling movement alters as the angle on the forward sprockets alters. So they put back a number of the strengthening construction but changed the appearance of it, so that the groin area got support without being, well, compressed or numbed by recurring training.

When the hockey stick firm sent their costly models out, the models got met with lackluster answers. The sticks had, in the words of the players, a 'dead feel' to them - they didn't transmit the awareness of the puck from the blade up the shaft as well as regular wooden and fiberglass sticks did. Moreover the efforts to make a uniform sweet spot went utterly awry, as that the hockey players have, from the time when the days of wooden sticks, taped and curved the blades of their sticks for modified handling techniques, and it's a very custom-made. The high density carbon fiber heads couldn't be twisted without them delaminating (something that triggered looks of revulsion when the delaminated examples were sent back to the manufacturer!) and taping them bended to, in the language of one player result in a 'I'm hitting the puck with a slab of bologna.' as a reaction. In essence the manufacturers had succeeded to make a correctly designed hockey stick, for one player, who had the playing features they'd modeled the new stick from.

The result of these two dissimilar methods to customer feedback ended in very dissimilar product development processes; the hockey stick makers found out that their work to date had been pointless - as they didn't ask the proper questions of their customer base. The cycling seat firmmakers attuned their product in response to user testing, and developed a method for determining achievement that was open enough to take mid course amendments.

As you can see from these distinct case studies, project management is crucially vital to the progression of any project, and the key to project management is sustaining suppleness all through the development process to see to the unanticipated effects of tests, next to with having an end user driven model of what creates success.

More resources on project management training for the sporting equipment industry