Project management, ended right is a blessing to any firm. It gives you a clearly stated goal, metrics for how to realize it, and a time and timetable for how to realize the objective with budgets for labor costs, progress and prototypes, and bringing it to market.
There are two illustrations from the sporting equipment field that stress project management, one optimistically one in the negative. 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 discover correct project management skills without driving your workers nuts, or wrecking your product release announcement.
The two commodities are for dissimilar sports (cycling and hockey), but that shouldn’t dissuade you from discovering the lessons needed from them.
First, both firms looked to product studies of their existing consumers to sample and verify unmet buyer wishes. In the domain of cycling, there have been lots of information on damage to men caused by bad produced cycling seats – they hold back blood flow to the groin and trigger pain and can even trigger damage to the erectile tissues, if not accurately adjusted. There’s good medical literature upholding this, and the surveys showed that, amongst male competitive cyclists, that this was something of a matter.
The product assessments for the hockey equipment manufacturers was more basic – was it workable to plot the practices that have given golf clubs superior driving range (with carbon fiber, and precisely composed heads) to hockey sticks? Studies of their potential customers pointed to there was a solid need for this.
Where the cycling business and hockey stick producers diverged in their initial evaluations was in defining their end ambitions. The hockey stick producers understood that since there was a encouraging signal for the product, that simply developing it would be a profitable product launch – they didn’t take the time to calculate what a winning ‘super stick’ would do and be for their customers. The cycling company started out with a unpretentious 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 firm 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 ‘usual posture’ was when riding a bicycle at diverse exertion intensities – rolling along on a flat has a different pose than cornering rigidly in a criterium, versus ascending hard on a road race stage.
The hockey stick producer made a fault by conceiving the stick and taking for granted that the statistics from a golf swing (which uses a wider traverse of arch) would map over to a hockey stick. As they gathered various performance information from professional 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 stiff pole and a blade with a enormously peculiar sweet spot.
By contrast, the cycle seat firm had recognized ways to remodel the front of the seat, so that the weight of the cyclist was distributed along the hip bones and tail bone, rather than through the pubic bone. Their opening models got objections that there was not enough power transfer to the legs while sitting down – the various lengths of the femur and tibia mean that the quantity of force that’s shifted in a pedaling motion varies as the angle on the forward sprockets varies. So they put back some of the reinforcing structure but changed the form of it, so that the groin area got help without being, well, crushed or numbed by constant continual use.
When the hockey stick firm sent their high-priced models out, the models got met with lackluster responses. The sticks had, in the words 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 normal wooden and fiberglass sticks did. Also the efforts 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 customized handling techniques, and it’s a very personalized process. The high density carbon fiber heads couldn’t be twisted without them delaminating (something that caused looks of repulsion when the delaminated trial products were sent back to the maker!) 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 response. In essence the manufacturers had succeeded to make a suitably designed hockey stick, for one player, who had the playing features they’d modeled the new stick from.
The outcome of these two distinct methods to customer feedback resulted in very dissimilar product development processes; the hockey stick company found out that their work to date had been wasted – because they didn’t ask the desirable questions of their customer base. The cycling seat manufacturer adjusted their design in response to user testing, and developed a methodology for determining achievement that was elastic enough to take mid course adjustments.
As you can see from these divergent case studies, project management is critically significant to the progression of any project, and the key to project management is preserving flexibility for the duration of the development process to handle the unforeseen 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
- William Akkermans