Project management training in the sporting industry
Project management, completed correct is a blessing to any enterprise. It gives you a plainly stated objective, metrics for how to do it, and a time and plan for how to meet the ambition with financial plans for labor overheads, development and prototypes, and bringing it to market.
There are two illustrations from the sporting gear discipline that highlight project management, one optimistically one in the negative. We’ll be embracing these examples from our most recent project management training in tandem, as a comparison and difference so that you can understand appropriate project management practices without driving your workforce nuts, or wrecking your product release announcement.
The two products are for different sports (cycling and hockey), but that shouldn’t discourage you from learning the lessons needed from them.
First, both makers looked to product surveys of their existing regulars to try and ascertain unmet buyer wishes. In the area of cycling, there have been lots of information on injury to men triggered by ill created cycling seats - they hamper blood flow to the groin and produce aches and can even produce injury to the erectile tissues, if not properly adjusted. There’s reliable medical literature supporting this, and the investigations suggested that, amongst male competitive cyclists, that this was something of a concern.
The product studies for the hockey paraphernalia manufacturers was more simple - was it feasible to plot the methods that have given golf clubs better driving range (with carbon fiber, and meticulously balanced heads) to hockey sticks? Surveys of their potential clients pointed to there was a clear demand for this.
Where the cycling business and hockey stick producers diverged in their initial opinions was in defining their end goals. The hockey stick producers thought that since there was a constructive indication for the product, that simply 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 customers. The cycling company started out with a unpretentious goal - ‘Make the most comfortable bicycle seat, contoured for the male anatomy, that can be done.’
Both teams spent time and money researching materials science. The cycling stuff makers looked into closed cell against open cell foam, seat coverage, and more. They put feelers into the shorts of cyclists and put them on traditiona bicycle seats to see where the pressure points were, and they put motion capture feelers on the cyclists to see what the ‘natural posture’ was when riding a bicycle at various exertion degrees - rolling along on a plane has a different posture than cornering tightly in a criterium, against ascending hard on a road race stage.
The hockey stick manufacture made a error by creating the stick and guessing that the figures from a golf swing (which uses a wider traverse of curve) would map over to a hockey stick. As they collected some operation statistics from expert and collegiate hockey players, they predominantly went with what was known, and improved the materials along the lines of high end golf clubs. The conclusion was a stick with a much more unyielding pole and a blade with a very quirky sweet spot.
By contrast, the cycle seat firm had recognized ways to reform the front of the seat, so that the weight of the cyclist was spread along the hip bones and tail bone, rather than through the pubic bone. Their first trial products got complaints that there was inadequate power transfer to the legs while sitting down - the various lengths of the femur and tibia mean that the amount of strength that’s transported in a pedaling motion changes as the angle on the forward sprockets changes. So they put back a few of the strengthening structure but changed the appearance of it, so that the groin area got support without being, well, compressed or numbed by frequent training.
When the hockey stick manufacturers sent their costly prototypes out, the prototypes got met with lackluster reactions. The sticks had, in the language of the players, a ‘dead feel’ to them - they didn’t pass on the feeling of the puck from the blade up the shaft as well as normal wooden and fiberglass sticks did. Additionally the efforts to make a standardized sweet spot went utterly awry, for the reason that the hockey players have, from the time when the days of wooden sticks, taped and bowed 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 warped without them delaminating (something that produced looks of repulsion when the delaminated prototypes were sent back to the firm!) and taping them tended 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 makers had succeeded to make a properly designed hockey stick, for one player, who had the playing features they’d modeled the new stick from.
The end of these two dissimilar stules to customer feedback resulted in very dissimilar product development processes; the hockey stick company found out that their work to date had been wasted - for the reason that they didn’t ask the proper questions of their customer base. The cycling seat company attuned their design in response to user testing, and developed a attitude for determining achievement that was elastic enough to take mid course tweaks.
As you can see from these different case studies, project management is critically significant to the growth of any project, and the key to project management is sustaining flexibility for the duration of the development process to control the unpredicted results of tests, along with having an end user driven model of what constitutes success.
More resources on project management training for the sporting equipment industry
- William Akkermans
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