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Project management, ended correct is a blessing to any venture. It gives you a plainly stated objective, metrics for how to do it, and a time and calendar for how to realize the objective with resources for labor overheads, progress and prototypes, and bringing it to market.

There are two examples from the sporting paraphernalia discipline that draw attention to project management, one positively one negatively. We’ll be dealing with these examples from our most recent project management training in tandem, as a comparison and contrast so that you can find out appropriate project management practices without driving your workers nuts, or wrecking your product release announcement.

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

First, both makers looked to product reviews of their existing clientele to test and ascertain unmet consumer needs. In the area of cycling, there have been lots of information on injury to men caused by ill formed cycling seats - they limit blood flow to the groin and cause pain and can even cause injury to the erectile tissues, if not well adjusted. There’s good medical literature proving this, and the assessments showed that, among male competitive cyclists, that this was something of a worry.

The product studies for the hockey paraphernalia manufacturers was more undemanding - was it achievable to plot the methods that have given golf clubs superior driving range (with carbon fiber, and precisely well-adjusted heads) to hockey sticks? Surveys of their would-be clients pointed out there was a convincing need for this.

Where the cycling corporation and hockey stick makers varied in their initial considerations was in defining their end objectives. The hockey stick makers believed that since there was a encouraging sign for the product, that only developing it would be a thriving product launch - they didn’t take the time to weigh up what a winning ’super stick’ would do and be for their clients. The cycling company started out with a simple goal - ‘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 manufacturers looked into closed cell versus open cell foam, seat coverage, and more. They put sensors into the Bermudas of cyclists and put them on typical bicycle seats to see where the stress points were, and they put motion capture sensors on the cyclists to see what the ‘natural posture’ was when riding a bicycle at diverse exertion degrees - rolling along on a horizontal has a another position than cornering harshly in a criterium, versus climbing hard on a road race stage.

The hockey stick producer made a fault by fabricating the stick and supposing that the data from a golf swing (which uses a wider traverse of arch) would map over to a hockey stick. While they collected a number of functioning facts from authority 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 end result was a stick with a much more unyielding pole and a blade with a extremely odd sweet spot.

By contrast, the cycle seat firm had found ways to remake 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 first prototypes got complaints that there was not enough power transfer to the legs while sitting down - the diverse lengths of the femur and tibia mean that the amount of force that’s transferred in a pedaling movement varies as the angle on the forward sprockets varies. So they put back a few of the reinforcing configuration but changed the character of it, so that the groin area got support without being, well, compressed or numbed by recurring use.

As the hockey stick company sent their high-priced models out, the models got met with lackluster replies. The sticks had, in the language of the players, a ‘dead feel’ to them - they didn’t transmit the sense of the puck from the blade up the shaft as well as conventional wooden and fiberglass sticks did. Moreover the endeavours to make a standardized sweet spot went utterly awry, as that the hockey players have, from the time when the days of wooden sticks, taped and bent the blades of their sticks for personalized handling techniques, and it’s a very custom-made. The high density carbon fiber heads couldn’t be twisted without them delaminating (something that instigated looks of revulsion when the delaminated samples were sent back to the manufacturer!) 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 reply. In essence the firm had managed to make a perfectly designed hockey stick, for one player, who had the playing features they’d modeled the new stick from.

The end of these two dissimilar methods to customer feedback resulted in very different product development processes; the hockey stick manufacturer discovered that their work to date had been useless - because they didn’t ask the right questions of their customer base. The cycling seat company adjusted their product in response to user testing, and developed a methodology for determining achievement that was compliant enough to take mid course alterations.

As you can see from these distinct case studies, project management is critically important to the development of any project, and the key to project management is maintaining suppleness throughout the development process to see to 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

- William Akkermans