Why this matters for evaluating my project
One of the recurring themes in the Research Project Management module of my MSc in Computer Science with Data Science has been that effective project management starts with reliable, up-to-date data — and visual tools are what make that data usable at a glance rather than buried in a to-do list. For my dissertation (data imputation on the Diabetes 130-US Hospitals dataset, targeting 30-day readmission), the challenge isn't team coordination — it's keeping track of an iterative process: testing imputation strategies, evaluating outcomes, and being able to justify those decisions later in my methodology write-up. This post documents how I arrived at a tool to support that.
Evaluating the options
I started from four standard project-planning tools — Gantt charts, timelines, Kanban boards, and RACI charts (Project Management Institute, 2021) — and quickly ruled out RACI entirely: it exists to clarify shared responsibility across multiple people, and as a solo researcher I have no team to allocate work across. The other three, however, map onto genuinely different needs: a Gantt chart or timeline for the fixed, non-negotiable milestones (data approval, evaluation, submission), and a visual board for the messier, iterative side of the work that doesn't move in a straight line — for which I settled on Scrumban, a hybrid of Kanban's board layout and Scrum's fixed-length sprints (Ladas, 2009), rather than a pure, continuous-flow Kanban setup.
Rather than stopping at the course materials, I researched what's actually being used in the market right now. A few tools kept surfacing specifically for research use: Notion (increasingly popular among researchers because it combines project management, note-taking, documentation, and knowledge management in a single platform), Trello (still widely recommended for individual researchers and small academic groups for its simplicity and Kanban-style tracking (Nowogrodzki, 2020)), and ClickUp, which came up repeatedly for its extensive customisation and suitability for complex, non-linear workflows. Miro was a useful counterpoint too — good for early-stage mapping of how ideas relate, but explicitly not designed for execution or long-term tracking, which ruled it out as a primary tool for me, though it could still be useful for the earlier design decisions.
My decision: ClickUp
I settled on ClickUp. The deciding factor was that its Gantt, board, and timeline views all draw from the same underlying task data — so I can hold one dataset (milestones plus experiment tracking) and simply change the view depending on what I need to see, rather than maintaining separate tools for scheduling and iteration tracking. I run the board as a Scrumban setup — Kanban's visual layout, but worked through in fixed weekly sprints rather than continuous flow — since a solo project benefits from regular checkpoints without needing Scrum's full ceremony (a Scrum Master, a Product Owner) that a one-person team has no use for. Its custom fields also let me attach structured metadata directly to each task — which imputation method was tested, the rationale, the outcome — functioning as a lightweight decision log built into the workflow itself, rather than a document I'd have to remember to update separately.
What I'm watching out for
ClickUp's flexibility is also its biggest risk for a solo user: it's easy to over-engineer the workspace before actually using it, especially given my own tendency to want to fully understand and structure a system before committing to it. My plan is to start with just two lists — milestones (Gantt view) and experiments (board view, run as Scrumban: To Try / Testing / Evaluated) — and only add complexity once I feel a genuine gap, rather than designing for problems I don't have yet.
References
Ladas, C. (2009) 'Scrumban: Essays on Kanban Systems for Lean Software Development'. Available at: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Scrumban%3A-Essays-on-Kanban-Systems-for-Lean-Ladas/09b6383d58f385c25580b095c32ca5246b1d1a84 (Accessed: 28 September 2026).
Nowogrodzki, A. (2020) 'What project-management software can do for scientists', Nature, 583. Available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01918-0 (Accessed: 28 September 2026).
Project Management Institute (ed.) (2021) The Standard for Project Management and a Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide). Seventh edition. Newtown Square, Pennsylvania: Project Management Institute, Inc.
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