The Dark Side of Project Management (Side 1).

The other evening I was listening to Dark Side of the Moon — an album I’ve returned to countless times. Growing up, Pink Floyd seemed to be a permanent feature in my life. What struck me that evening in my contemplative revelry wasn’t just the music but the way it had been assembled. I remember reading at the time that the group had an ensemble of songs that already existed, Breathe, Us and Them, and Brain Damage, but they didn’t have a coherent theme. Then one morning back in ’72, Roger Waters came up with the ingenious idea of linking all the songs together in order to turn each side of the vinyl album into a single track, creating a musical unit that embodied the unifying concept behind the album.

In David Gilmour’s words “When Roger walked into Broadhurst Gardens with the idea of putting it all together as one piece with this linking theme he’d devised, that was a moment”.

That struck me as not so different from projects. Many initiatives start life as disconnected tasks or deliverables, but the real art is in linking them together so that the whole has meaning and coherence. A project becomes a program when those connections work seamlessly — just as Dark Side of the Moon became more than the sum of its songs.

Which brings me first to time. Pink Floyd captured it perfectly when they wrote:

“And then one day you find / Ten years have got behind you / No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.”

Projects often lose time before they even begin. Mobilisations drag, approvals stall, decisions take too long. By the time the “starting gun” finally fires, the context has shifted and opportunities have slipped away. Managing time in projects is never just about schedules and Gantt charts — it’s about momentum, energy, and recognising the cost of standing still.

And if time is one challenge, money is another. It’s impossible to think about projects without hearing Floyd’s cynicism:

“Money, it’s a gas / Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash.”

Few forces shape a project more than money. Financial discipline is essential, of course, but too often it becomes the only voice at the table. In boardrooms, cost can trump purpose, overshadowing the value the project was meant to deliver. It’s a tension every project manager knows — keeping the balance between fiscal responsibility and staying true to the project’s core intent.

These are the obvious shadows in project management: time and money. But as with the album, the story doesn’t end there. Dark Side of the Moon takes us further into risk, madness, and finally a kind of resolution — and so too do projects. In Side 2, I’ll explore those deeper challenges and how they, too, must be linked into the whole.