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Project management, finished right is a blessing to any business. It gives you a clearly stated ambition, metrics for how to accomplish it, and a time and calendar for how to meet the goal with financial plans for labor overheads, growth and prototypes, and bringing it to market.

There are two illustrations from the sporting gear domain that stress project management, one optimistically 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 learn good project management techniques without driving your employees nuts, or wrecking your product release announcement.

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

First, both manufacturers looked to product surveys of their existing clientele to test and ascertain unmet buyer requests. In the realm of cycling, there have been lots of reports on harm to men caused by bad created cycling seats - they limit blood flow to the groin and bring about aches and can even bring about harm to the erectile tissues, if not properly adjusted. There's firm medical literature confirming this, and the assessments suggested that, amid male competitive cyclists, that this was something of a concern.

The product evaluations for the hockey equipment manufacturers was more undemanding - was it possible to map the practices that have given golf clubs better driving range (with carbon fiber, and thoroughly well-adjusted heads) to hockey sticks? Studies of their possible consumers pointed to there was a potent need for this.

Where the cycling company and hockey stick producers varied in their primary considerations was in defining their end goals. The hockey stick producers understood that since there was a optimistic sign for the product, that just developing it would be a profitable product launch - they didn't take the time to weigh up what a successful 'super stick' would do and be for their clientele. The cycling company started out with a uncomplicated goal - 'Make the most comfortable bicycle seat, contoured for the male anatomy, that can be done.'

Both parties spent time and money investigating materials science. The cycling gear manufacturers looked into closed cell against open cell foam, seat coverage, and more. They put sensors into the shorts of cyclists and put them on traditiona bicycle seats to see where the burden points were, and they put motion capture sensors on the cyclists to see what the 'normalordinary posture' was when riding a bicycle at different exertion degrees - rolling along on a horizontal has a different posture than cornering harshly in a criterium, against climbing hard on a road race stage.

The hockey stick firm made a fault by fabricating the stick and assuming that the data from a golf swing (which uses a wider traverse of curve) would map over to a hockey stick. While they collected a number of functioning numbers from authority and collegiate hockey players, they mostly 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 rigid shaft and a blade with a extremely peculiar sweet spot.

By contrast, the cycle seat manufacturer had identified ways to restructure 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 preliminary trial products got objections that there was inadequate power transfer to the legs while sitting down - the various lengths of the femur and tibia mean that the quantity of energy that's transmitted in a pedaling movement varies as the angle on the forward sprockets varies. So they put back various of the reinforcing configuration but changed the appearance of it, so that the groin area got help without being, well, compressed or numbed by constant continual training.

As the hockey stick manufacturers sent their expensive models out, the models 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. In addition the endeavours to make a standardized sweet spot went totally awry, because that the hockey players have, ever since the days of wooden sticks, taped and bent the blades of their sticks for personalized handling techniques, and it's a very personalized process. The high density carbon fiber heads couldn't be bent without them delaminating (something that triggered looks of revulsion when the delaminated prototypes were sent back to the firm!) and taping them tended to, in the language of one participant result in a 'I'm hitting the puck with a slab of bologna.' as a answer. In essence the firm had succeeded to make a properly designed hockey stick, for one player, who had the playing features they'd modeled the new stick from.

The end result of these two distinct tactics to customer feedback resulted in very dissimilar product development processes; the hockey stick firm discovered that their work to date had been useless - for the reason that they didn't ask the suitable questions of their customer base. The cycling seat manufacturer attuned their product in response to user testing, and developed a methodology for determining success that was compliant enough to take mid course adjustments.

As you can see from these contrasting case studies, project management is vitally vital to the growth of any project, and the key to project management is maintaining suppleness throughout the development process to cope with the unexpected effects 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