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Project management, ended right is a blessing to any venture. It gives you a plainly stated target, metrics for how to attain it, and a time and programme for how to meet the target with financial plans for labor overheads, improvement and prototypes, and bringing it to market.

There are two cases from the sporting paraphernalia discipline that highlight project management, one positively one in the negative. We'll be dealing with these examples from our most recent project management training in tandem, as a comparison and difference so that you can become skilled at proper project management techniques without driving your workers nuts, or wrecking your product release announcement.

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

First, both manufacturers looked to product analysis of their existing consumers to check out and find out unmet buyer needs. In the realm of cycling, there have been lots of reports on damage to men triggered by bad formed cycling seats - they restrict blood flow to the groin and instigate aches and can even instigate damage to the erectile tissues, if not correctly adjusted. There's watertight medical literature supporting this, and the surveys indicated that, among male competitive cyclists, that this was something of a concern.

The product assessments for the hockey gear manufacturers was more straightforward - was it workable to chart the practices that have given golf clubs superior driving range (with carbon fiber, and thoroughly composed heads) to hockey sticks? Evaluations of their possible customers signaled there was a potent demand for this.

Where the cycling company and hockey stick producers differed in their initial reviews was in defining their end objectives. The hockey stick producers understood that since there was a constructive signal for the product, that only developing it would be a lucrative product launch - they didn't take the time to calculate what a winning 'super stick' would do and be for their customers. The cycling company started out with a simple ambition - 'Make the most comfortable bicycle seat, contoured for the male anatomy, that can be done.'

Both sides spent time and money researching materials science. The cycling gear manufacturers looked into closed cell against open cell foam, seat coverage, and more. They put sensors into the Bermudas of cyclists and put them on usual 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 different exertion levels - rolling along on a flat has a different position than cornering stringently in a criterium, against climbing hard on a road race stage.

The hockey stick manufacture made a fault by designing the stick and believing that the information from a golf swing (which uses a wider traverse of arch) would map over to a hockey stick. While they gathered various working information from specialist and collegiate hockey players, they mostly went with what was known, and upgraded the materials along the lines of high end golf clubs. The ending was a stick with a much more unbending shaft and a blade with a enormously strange sweet spot.

By contrast, the cycle seat manufacturer had identified ways to redesign the front of the seat, so that the weight of the cyclist was distributed along the hip bones and tail bone, rather than through the pubic bone. Their opening prototypes got complaints that there was insufficient power transfer to the legs while sitting down - the diverse lengths of the femur and tibia mean that the amount of energy that's transported in a pedaling motion changes as the angle on the forward sprockets changes. So they put back certain of the reinforcing structure but changed the character 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 high-priced prototypes out, the prototypes got met with lackluster reactions. 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 normal wooden and fiberglass sticks did. In addition the efforts to make a harmonized sweet spot went entirely awry, as that the hockey players have, since the days of wooden sticks, taped and curved 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 warped without them delaminating (something that caused looks of horror when the delaminated models were sent back to the company!) 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 correctly designed hockey stick, for one player, who had the playing features they'd modeled the new stick from.

The consequence of these two distinct stules to customer feedback ended in very different 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 company attuned their design in response to user testing, and developed a tactic for determining achievement that was flexible enough to take mid course improvements.

As you can see from these different case studies, project management is critically significant to the development of any project, and the key to project management is maintaining suppleness for the duration of the development process to cope with the unforeseen results of tests, along with having an end user driven system of what constitutes success.

More resources on project management training for the sporting equipment industry