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Project management, done correct is a blessing to any organization. It gives you a plainly stated purpose, metrics for how to reach it, and a time and schedule for how to meet the goal with resources for labor costs, expansion and prototypes, and bringing it to market.

There are two examples from the sporting tools domain that emphasize 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 contrast so that you can ascertain proper project management methods without driving your employees nuts, or wrecking your product release announcement.

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

First, both companies looked to product evaluations of their existing customers to evaluate and find out unmet buyer wants. In the area of cycling, there have been lots of rumor on injury to men caused by ill created cycling seats - they restrict blood flow to the groin and trigger aches and can even trigger injury to the erectile tissues, if not correctly adjusted. There's reliable medical literature confirming this, and the studies suggested that, amongst male competitive cyclists, that this was something of a matter.

The product evaluations for the hockey paraphernalia manufacturers was more basic - was it achievable to map the practices that have given golf clubs superior driving range (with carbon fiber, and carefully composed heads) to hockey sticks? Assessments of their would-be customers signaled there was a potent demand for this.

Where the cycling company and hockey stick firm diverged in their primary opinions was in defining their end ambitions. The hockey stick firm supposed that since there was a constructive sign for the product, that simply developing it would be a flourishing product launch - they didn't take the time to assess what a winning 'super stick' would do and be for their clients. The cycling company started out with a down-to-earth objective - '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 stuff firm looked into closed cell versus open cell foam, seat coverage, and more. They put sensors into the shorts of cyclists and put them on conventional bicycle seats to see where the pressure points were, and they put motion capture sensors on the cyclists to see what the 'normalordinary posture' was when riding a bicycle at diverse exertion intensities - rolling along on a horizontal has a different position than cornering stringently in a criterium, versus climbing hard on a road race stage.

The hockey stick firm made a error by creating the stick and supposing that the data from a golf swing (which uses a wider traverse of arch) would map over to a hockey stick. While they gathered some functioning numbers from authority and collegiate hockey players, they on the whole went with what was known, and improved the materials along the lines of high end golf clubs. The end result was a stick with a much more unyielding shaft and a blade with a exceptionally quirky sweet spot.

By contrast, the cycle seat firm had found ways to remodel the front of the seat, so that the weight of the cyclist was dispersed along the hip bones and tail bone, rather than through the pubic bone. Their opening trial products got criticism that there was insufficient power transfer to the legs while sitting down - the various lengths of the femur and tibia mean that the quantity of strength that's shifted in a pedaling motion alters as the angle on the forward sprockets alters. So they put back various of the strengthening construction but changed the shape of it, so that the groin area got help without being, well, crushed or numbed by constant continual use.

As the hockey stick makers sent their costly prototypes out, the prototypes got met with lackluster reactions. The sticks had, in the expression of the players, a 'dead feel' to them - they didn't pass on the sense of the puck from the blade up the shaft as well as normal wooden and fiberglass sticks did. Furthermore the efforts to make a uniform sweet spot went fully awry, as that the hockey players have, since the days of wooden sticks, taped and curved the blades of their sticks for tailored handling techniques, and it's a very personalized process. The high density carbon fiber heads couldn't be warped without them delaminating (something that instigated looks of repulsion when the delaminated samples 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 manufacturers had managed to make a well designed hockey stick, for one player, who had the playing quality they'd modeled the new stick from.

The outcome of these two separate tactics to customer feedback resulted in very dissimilar product development processes; the hockey stick manufacturer found out that their work to date had been wasted - as they didn't ask the right questions of their customer base. The cycling seat firmmakers attuned their design in response to user testing, and developed a methodology for determining achievement that was open enough to take mid course tweaks.

As you can see from these distinct case studies, project management is vitally significant to the development of any project, and the key to project management is maintaining flexibility during the development process to deal with the unexpected outcomes of tests, beside with having an end user driven model of what constitutes success.

More resources on project management training for the sporting equipment industry