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Project management, finished correct is a blessing to any venture. It gives you a openly stated ambition, metrics for how to accomplish it, and a time and programme for how to realize the target with budgets for labor costs, progress and prototypes, and bringing it to market.

There are two illustrations from the sporting equipment domain that bring to light 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 contrast so that you can become skilled at proper project management practices without driving your employees nuts, or wrecking your product release announcement.

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

First, both makers looked to product studies of their existing clients to test and find out unmet buyer requests. In the realm of cycling, there have been lots of intelligence on injury to men caused by poorly formed cycling seats - they restrict blood flow to the groin and instigate pain and can even instigate injury to the erectile tissues, if not right adjusted. There's watertight medical literature proving this, and the studies indicated that, amid male competitive cyclists, that this was something of a matter.

The product studies for the hockey kit manufacturers was more undemanding - was it possible to plot the procedures that have given golf clubs enhanced driving range (with carbon fiber, and precisely balanced heads) to hockey sticks? Evaluations of their potential clients suggested there was a sound need for this.

Where the cycling company and hockey stick makers diverged in their first opinions was in defining their end goals. The hockey stick makers understood that since there was a encouraging sign for the product, that only developing it would be a booming product launch - they didn't take the time to calculate what a winning 'super stick' would do and be for their clientele. The cycling company started out with a unpretentious objective - 'Make the most comfortable bicycle seat, contoured for the male anatomy, that can be done.'

Both parties spent time and money investigating materials science. The cycling gear producers looked into closed cell versus open cell foam, seat coverage, and more. They put sensors into the shorts of cyclists and put them on typical bicycle seats to see where the burden 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 horizontal has a another position than cornering tightly in a criterium, versus climbing hard on a road race stage.

The hockey stick manufacture made a mistake by designing the stick and assuming that the facts from a golf swing (which uses a wider traverse of arch) would map over to a hockey stick. While they collected various working information from professional 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 ending was a stick with a much more rigid shaft and a blade with a enormously unusual sweet spot.

By contrast, the cycle seat manufacturer had found ways to restyle the front of the seat, so that the mass of the cyclist was dispersed along the hip bones and tail bone, rather than through the pubic bone. Their opening prototypes got criticism that there was insufficient power transfer to the legs while sitting down - the separate lengths of the femur and tibia mean that the amount of strength that's transmitted in a pedaling motion changes as the angle on the forward sprockets changes. So they put back certain of the strengthening construction but changed the appearance of it, so that the groin area got aid without being, well, flattened or numbed by recurring training.

As the hockey stick firm sent their expensive saples out, the saples got met with lackluster responses. The sticks had, in the words of the players, a 'dead feel' to them - they didn't convey the sensation of the puck from the blade up the shaft as well as normal wooden and fiberglass sticks did. Additionally the attempts to make a harmonized sweet spot went totally awry, because that the hockey players have, since the days of wooden sticks, taped and bent the blades of their sticks for modified handling techniques, and it's a very personalized process. The high density carbon fiber heads couldn't be bent without them delaminating (something that instigated looks of revulsion when the delaminated models were sent back to the firm!) and taping them bended to, in the words of one participant result in a 'I'm hitting the puck with a slab of bologna.' as a reply. 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 consequence of these two different stules to customer feedback ended in very different product development processes; the hockey stick makers found out that their work to date had been pointless - since they didn't ask the proper questions of their customer base. The cycling seat manufacturer attuned their design in response to user testing, and developed a methodology for determining triumph that was flexible enough to take mid course adjustments.

As you can see from these divergent case studies, project management is crucially imperative to the growth of any project, and the key to project management is upholding flexibility for the duration of the development process to cope with the unanticipated effects of tests, beside with having an end user driven system of what creates success.

More resources on project management training for the sporting equipment industry