Successful project planning manages the competing aspects of time, cost and quality and minimizing the risk to each. Altering one of these will affect one or both other factors, for example:
- If you want to save money, it will cost you more time as you’ll have to do more yourself (or get friends to help), or you’ll have to reduce the quality if you want the bike done in the same amount of time.
- If you have more money to spend, you can increase the quality (buy better parts and materials, outsource some work to professionals) or you can do it quicker as you can pay professionals to take on some aspects of the build while you work in parallel.
- If you want to save time, it will cost you more money to pay for help in some way, or you’ll have to rush your work and potentially reduce quality.
- If you have extra time, you can spend it on achieving a higher quality finish to your work or save costs by doing additional work yourself. If you want an extremely high-quality finish, it will take a lot of extra time to achieve it or cost more for the right parts, tools or help
- If you are happy to reduce the quality of your finished product you can generally save time and/or cost.
You'll find a unique balance for your project that is influenced by your available spare time and funds and skills.
Understandably, managing the process of a custom build will be different for each person. The detail, complexity and success of your planning will most likely be determined by:
- your previous experience or knowledge of building bikes, and
- your commitment to create a useful plan, follow it, and measure yourself against it during the build.