Project management, ended correct is a benefit to any firm. It gives you a plainly stated target, metrics for how to reach it, and a time and programme for how to meet the goal with financial plans for labor overheads, expansion and prototypes, and bringing it to market.

There are two cases from the sporting gear area that bring to light project management, one optimistically one unconstructively. We'll be covering these examples from our most recent project management training in tandem, as a comparison and difference so that you can study correct project management methods without driving your employees nuts, or wrecking your product release announcement.

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

First, both producers looked to product reviews of their existing regulars to evaluate and uncover unmet consumer requirements. In the branch of cycling, there have been lots of rumor on injury to men triggered by poorly created cycling seats - they restrict blood flow to the groin and cause pain and can even cause injury to the erectile tissues, if not right adjusted. There's sound medical literature confirming this, and the assessments suggested that, amid male competitive cyclists, that this was something of a worry.

The product assessments for the hockey gear manufacturers was more clear-cut - was it achievable to chart the techniques that have given golf clubs improved driving range (with carbon fiber, and carefully well-adjusted heads) to hockey sticks? Surveys of their potential clientele suggested there was a firm demand for this.

Where the cycling company and hockey stick producers differed in their primary reviews was in defining their end goals. The hockey stick producers believed that since there was a encouraging indication for the product, that only developing it would be a thriving product launch - they didn't take the time to assess what a successful 'super stick' would do and be for their clientele. The cycling company started out with a uncomplicated aspiration - 'Make the most comfortable bicycle seat, contoured for the male anatomy, that can be done.'

Both groups spent time and money researching materials science. The cycling gear producers looked into closed cell versus open cell foam, seat coverage, and more. They put feelers into the Bermudas of cyclists and put them on usual bicycle seats to see where the burden points were, and they put motion capture feelers on the cyclists to see what the 'expected posture' was when riding a bicycle at various exertion intensities - rolling along on a flat has a different pose than cornering stringently in a criterium, versus going up hard on a road race stage.

The hockey stick producer made a mistake by inventing the stick and supposing that the information from a golf swing (which uses a wider traverse of arc) would map over to a hockey stick. While they collected a number of performance numbers from specialist and collegiate hockey players, they for the most part 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 rigid shaft and a blade with a very peculiar sweet spot.

By contrast, the cycle seat company had identified ways to reshape the front of the seat, so that the mass of the cyclist was dispersed along the hip bones and tail bone, instead through the pubic bone. Their original trial products got criticism that there was unsatisfactory power transfer to the legs while sitting down - the diverse lengths of the femur and tibia mean that the amount of muscle that's shifted in a pedaling movement alters as the angle on the forward sprockets alters. So they put back several of the strengthening construction but changed the character of it, so that the groin area got aid without being, well, flattened or numbed by frequent training.

As the hockey stick company sent their expensive examples out, the examples got met with lackluster reactions. The sticks had, in the language 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 traditional wooden and fiberglass sticks did. Additionally the efforts to make a harmonized sweet spot went totally awry, since that the hockey players have, since the days of wooden sticks, taped and curved the blades of their sticks for adapted handling techniques, and it's a very custom-made. The high density carbon fiber heads couldn't be warped without them delaminating (something that instigated looks of revulsion when the delaminated trial products were sent back to the manufacturer!) and taping them inclined to, in the words of one team member result in a 'I'm hitting the puck with a slab of bologna.' as a reaction. 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 end result of these two different stules to customer feedback resulted in very dissimilar product development processes; the hockey stick company discovered that their work to date had been useless - since they didn't ask the right questions of their clients base. The cycling seat company adjusted their design in response to user testing, and developed a tactic for determining triumph that was open enough to take mid course tweaks.

As you can see from these contrasting case studies, project management is critically imperative to the development of any project, and the key to project management is upholding suppleness throughout the development process to see to the unforeseen results of tests, along with having an end user driven model of what constitutes success.

More resources on project management training for the sporting equipment industry