Project management, ended accurate is a blessing to any company. It gives you a plainly stated purpose, metrics for how to complete it, and a time and schedule for how to meet the objective with budgets for labor expenses, improvement and prototypes, and bringing it to market.

There are two examples from the sporting paraphernalia sphere that emphasize project management, one positively one negatively. We'll be covering these examples from our latest project management training in tandem, as a comparison and difference so that you can ascertain proper project management practices without driving your workers nuts, or wrecking your product release announcement.

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

First, both firms looked to product analysis of their existing clientele to test and ascertain unmet client needs. In the sphere of cycling, there have been lots of reports on injury to men triggered by poorly shaped cycling seats - they hamper blood flow to the groin and produce aches and can even produce injury to the erectile tissues, if not accurately adjusted. There's firm medical literature upholding this, and the investigations indicated that, amid male competitive cyclists, that this was something of a concern.

The product assessments for the hockey gear manufacturers was more undemanding - was it workable to map the methods that have given golf clubs superior driving range (with carbon fiber, and precisely composed heads) to hockey sticks? Evaluations of their potential clientele indicated there was a potent need for this.

Where the cycling business and hockey stick producers differed in their initial evaluations was in defining their end objectives. The hockey stick producers supposed that since there was a optimistic indication for the product, that merely 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 customers. The cycling company started out with a easy ambition - 'Make the most comfortable bicycle seat, contoured for the male anatomy, that can be done.'

Both sides spent time and money exploring materials science. The cycling gear makers 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 different exertion levels - rolling along on a plane has a another pose than cornering harshly in a criterium, versus ascending hard on a road race stage.

The hockey stick producer made a error by inventing the stick and guessing that the figures from a golf swing (which uses a wider traverse of arch) would map over to a hockey stick. As they harvested various functioning numbers from specialist and collegiate hockey players, they for the most part went with what was known, and improved the materials along the lines of high end golf clubs. The result was a stick with a much more rigid shaft and a blade with a very peculiar sweet spot.

By contrast, the cycle seat firm had identified ways to remake 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 early prototypes got complaints that there was unsatisfactory power transfer to the legs while sitting down - the various lengths of the femur and tibia mean that the amount of strength that's transferred in a pedaling motion changes as the angle on the forward sprockets changes. So they put back a number of the strengthening configuration but changed the character of it, so that the groin area got aid without being, well, crushed or numbed by frequent use.

As the hockey stick firm sent their high-priced prototypes out, the prototypes got met with lackluster responses. The sticks had, in the words of the players, a 'dead feel' to them - they didn't pass on the awareness of the puck from the blade up the shaft as well as typical wooden and fiberglass sticks did. Furthermore the attempts to make a harmonized sweet spot went totally awry, since that the hockey players have, since the days of wooden sticks, taped and bent 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 triggered looks of repulsion when the delaminated samples were sent back to the maker!) and taping them bended to, in the words of one team member result in a 'I'm hitting the puck with a slab of bologna.' as a response. In essence the company had managed to make a suitably designed hockey stick, for one player, who had the playing features they'd modeled the new stick from.

The end 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 pointless - as they didn't ask the desirable questions of their customer base. The cycling seat firmmakers adjusted their design in response to user testing, and developed a style for determining success that was compliant enough to take mid course alterations.

As you can see from these different case studies, project management is vitally imperative to the progression of any project, and the key to project management is sustaining flexibility throughout the development process to cope with the unexpected effects of tests, along with having an end user driven system of what creates success.

More resources on project management training for the sporting equipment industry