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Project management, done right, is a godsend to any business. It gives you a clearly stated goal, metrics for how to achieve it, and a time and schedule for how to meet the goal, with budgets for labor costs, development and prototypes, and bringing it to market.
There are two examples from the sporting equipment field that highlight project management, one positively, one negatively. We’ll be covering these examples from our latest project management training in tandem, as a comparison and contrast, so that you can learn proper project management techniques without driving your employees nuts, or wrecking your product release.
The two products are for different sports (cycling and hockey), but that shouldn’t dissuade you from learning the lessons needed from them.
First, both manufacturers looked to product surveys of their existing customers to try and determine unmet client needs. In the realm of cycling, there have been lots of reports on damage to men caused by ill formed cycling seats – they restrict blood flow to the groin and cause aches, and can even cause damage to the erectile tissues, if not properly adjusted. There’s sound medical literature supporting this, and the surveys indicated that, among male competitive cyclists, that this was something of a concern.
The product surveys for the hockey gear manufacturers was more straightforward – was it possible to map the techniques that have given golf clubs better driving range (with carbon fiber, and carefully balanced heads) to hockey sticks? Surveys of their potential clients indicated there was a strong demand for this.
Where the cycling company and hockey stick manufacturers differed in their initial assessments was in defining their end goals. The hockey stick manufacturers assumed that since there was a positive indication for the product, that simply developing it would be a successful product launch – they didn’t take the time to assess what a successful "super stick" would do and be for their customers. 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 teams spent time and money researching materials science. The cycling gear manufacturers 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 "natural posture" was when riding a bicycle at different exertion levels – rolling along on a flat has a different posture 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 data from a golf swing (which uses a wider traverse of arc) would map over to a hockey stick. While they gathered some performance data from professional and collegiate hockey players, they mostly 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 rigid shaft, and a blade with a very quirky sweet spot.
By contrast, the cycle seat manufacturer had identified ways to re-shape 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 initial prototypes got complaints that there was insufficient power transfer to the legs while sitting down – the different lengths of the femur and tibia mean that the amount of power that’s transferred in a pedaling motion changes as the angle on the forward sprockets changes. So they put back some of the reinforcing structure, but changed the shape of it, so that the groin area got support without being, well, crushed or numbed by repeated exercise.
When the hockey stick manufacturers sent their expensive 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 transmit the sensation of the puck from the blade up the shaft as well as conventional wooden and fiberglass sticks did. Furthermore, the attempts to make a uniform sweet spot went completely awry, because 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 warped without them delaminating (something that caused looks of horror when the delaminated prototypes were sent back to the manufacturer!) and taping them tended to, in the words of one player, result in a "I’m hitting the puck with a slab of bologna." as a response. In essence the manufacturers had managed to make a well designed hockey stick, for one player, who had the playing characteristics they’d modeled the new stick from.
The result of these two different approaches to customer feedback resulted in very different product development processes; the hockey stick manufacturer discovered that their work to date had been wasted – because they didn’t ask the right questions of their customer base. The cycling seat manufacturer adjusted their design in response to user testing, and developed a methodology for determining success that was flexible enough to take mid course corrections.
As you can see from these contrasting case studies, project management is critically important to the development of any project, and the key to project management is maintaining flexibility during the development process to handle the unexpected outcomes of tests, along with having an end user driven model of what constitutes success.
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