Project management, finished right is a blessing to any corporation. It gives you a plainly stated ambition, metrics for how to do it, and a time and plan for how to meet the ambition with financial plans for labor expenses, growth and prototypes, and bringing it to market.

There are two examples from the sporting tools sphere that stress project management, one optimistically one unconstructively. We'll be embracing these examples from our latest project management training in tandem, as a comparison and contrast so that you can understand accurate project management practices without driving your workforce nuts, or wrecking your product release announcement.

The two products 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 consumers to evaluate and determine unmet consumer desires. In the domain of cycling, there have been lots of reports on damage to men caused by poorly produced cycling seats - they limit blood flow to the groin and initiate pain and can even initiate damage to the erectile tissues, if not right adjusted. There's watertight medical literature upholding this, and the investigations showed that, amongst male competitive cyclists, that this was something of a concern.

The product evaluations for the hockey gear manufacturers was more clear-cut - was it achievable to plot the practices that have given golf clubs enhanced driving range (with carbon fiber, and carefully well-adjusted heads) to hockey sticks? Studies of their potential clients revealed there was a firm demand for this.

Where the cycling corporation and hockey stick producers varied in their original reviews was in defining their end targets. The hockey stick producers believed that since there was a optimistic signal for the product, that merely developing it would be a flourishing product launch - they didn't take the time to weigh up what a winning 'super stick' would do and be for their consumers. The cycling company started out with a down-to-earth ambition - 'Make the most comfortable bicycle seat, contoured for the male anatomy, that can be done.'

Both teams spent time and money researching materials science. The cycling stuff company looked into closed cell against open cell foam, seat coverage, and more. They put sensors into the Bermudas of cyclists and put them on regular bicycle seats to see where the stress points were, and they put motion capture sensors on the cyclists to see what the 'expected posture' was when riding a bicycle at various exertion levels - rolling along on a flat has a different position than cornering rigidly in a criterium, against climbing hard on a road race stage.

The hockey stick producer made a fault by fabricating the stick and believing that the facts from a golf swing (which uses a wider traverse of curve) would map over to a hockey stick. As they gathered some performance numbers from authority and collegiate hockey players, they mainly 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 unyielding bar and a blade with a enormously strange sweet spot.

By contrast, the cycle seat firm had recognized ways to reshape the front of the seat, so that the mass of the cyclist was spread along the hip bones and tail bone, rather than through the pubic bone. Their early prototypes got protest that there was insufficient power transfer to the legs while sitting down - the dissimilar lengths of the femur and tibia mean that the quantity of energy that's transported in a pedaling movement alters as the angle on the forward sprockets alters. So they put back various of the strengthening structure but changed the appearance of it, so that the groin area got help without being, well, flattened or numbed by repeated use.

As the hockey stick manufacturers sent their expensive prototypes out, the prototypes got met with lackluster answers. The sticks had, in the language of the players, a 'dead feel' to them - they didn't pass on the sensation of the puck from the blade up the shaft as well as normal wooden and fiberglass sticks did. Furthermore the efforts to make a standardized sweet spot went entirely awry, since that the hockey players have, ever since the days of wooden sticks, taped and bent the blades of their sticks for customized handling techniques, and it's a very personalized process. The high density carbon fiber heads couldn't be twisted without them delaminating (something that instigated looks of repulsion when the delaminated examples were sent back to the maker!) and taping them inclined to, in the words of one player result in a 'I'm hitting the puck with a slab of bologna.' as a reply. In essence the manufacturers had managed to make a suitably designed hockey stick, for one player, who had the playing quality they'd modeled the new stick from.

The outcome of these two different methods to customer feedback resulted in very dissimilar product development processes; the hockey stick manufacturer discovered that their work to date had been useless - since they didn't ask the accurate questions of their clients base. The cycling seat manufacturer attuned their design in response to user testing, and developed a attitude for determining triumph that was open enough to take mid course adjustments.

As you can see from these complementary case studies, project management is vitally important to the progression of any project, and the key to project management is sustaining flexibility during the development process to handle the unforeseen outcomes 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