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Project management, done correct is a godsend to any enterprise. It gives you a openly stated purpose, metrics for how to achieve it, and a time and timetable for how to meet the ambition with resources for labor costs, growth and prototypes, and bringing it to market.

There are two cases from the sporting gear area that draw attention to project management, one positively one unconstructively. We'll be embracing these examples from our most up-to-date project management training in tandem, as a comparison and difference so that you can ascertain correct project management practices without driving your workers nuts, or wrecking your product release announcement.

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

First, both manufacturers looked to product studies of their existing clients to evaluate and determine unmet customer requests. In the sphere of cycling, there have been lots of intelligence on injury to men caused by bad formed cycling seats - they hold back blood flow to the groin and bring about aches and can even bring about injury to the erectile tissues, if not well adjusted. There's good medical literature supporting this, and the studies indicated that, amongst male competitive cyclists, that this was something of a concern.

The product assessments for the hockey equipment manufacturers was more uncomplicated - was it feasible to plot the procedures that have given golf clubs enhanced driving range (with carbon fiber, and precisely composed heads) to hockey sticks? Studies of their possible consumers pointed to there was a clear need for this.

Where the cycling business and hockey stick makers diverged in their original estimations was in defining their end targets. The hockey stick makers believed that since there was a encouraging signal for the product, that simply developing it would be a lucrative product launch - they didn't take the time to measure what a successful 'super stick' would do and be for their clients. The cycling company started out with a easy aspiration - 'Make the most comfortable bicycle seat, contoured for the male anatomy, that can be done.'

Both parties spent time and money exploring materials science. The cycling gear producers looked into closed cell against open cell foam, seat coverage, and more. They put sensors into the shorts of cyclists and put them on usual 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 several exertion intensities - rolling along on a plane has a different posture than cornering rigidly in a criterium, against going up hard on a road race stage.

The hockey stick producer made a blunder by inventing the stick and supposing that the numbers from a golf swing (which uses a wider traverse of curve) would map over to a hockey stick. As they gathered a number of working statistics from expert and collegiate hockey players, they on the whole 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 unbending bar and a blade with a very unusual sweet spot.

By contrast, the cycle seat manufacturer had recognized ways to reform 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 objections that there was lacking power transmission to the legs while sitting down - the diverse lengths of the femur and tibia mean that the quantity of force that's shifted in a pedaling motion alters as the angle on the forward sprockets alters. So they put back various of the reinforcing construction but changed the character of it, so that the groin area got aid without being, well, crushed or numbed by recurring exercise.

When the hockey stick firm sent their expensive prototypes out, the prototypes got met with lackluster responses. The sticks had, in the expression of the players, a 'dead feel' to them - they didn't transmit the feeling of the puck from the blade up the shaft as well as conventional wooden and fiberglass sticks did. Furthermore the endeavours to make a harmonized sweet spot went utterly awry, since that the hockey players have, from the time when the days of wooden sticks, taped and bent the blades of their sticks for modified handling techniques, and it's a very custom-made. The high density carbon fiber heads couldn't be bent without them delaminating (something that instigated looks of repulsion when the delaminated trial products were sent back to the manufacturer!) and taping them inclined to, in the language of one team member result in a 'I'm hitting the puck with a slab of bologna.' as a reaction. In essence the company had managed to make a perfectly designed hockey stick, for one player, who had the playing quality they'd modeled the new stick from.

The end of these two dissimilar tactics to customer feedback ended in very different product development processes; the hockey stick manufacturer discovered that their work to date had been pointless - because they didn't ask the correct questions of their clients base. The cycling seat manufacturer adjusted their product in response to user testing, and developed a tactic for determining achievement that was open enough to take mid course amendments.

As you can see from these complementary case studies, project management is critically significant to the development of any project, and the key to project management is upholding flexibility all through the development process to control the unpredicted outcomes of tests, next to with having an end user driven system of what creates success.

More resources on project management training for the sporting equipment industry