Progress tracking tool for managing PhD students I am looking for good options for tools to manage my PhD students, in terms of seeing that they are on track in working out their PhD theses (I am in the UK, three year system) and are hitting their necessary milestones. Each year, as the number of students I supervise grow, it becomes more unwieldy to keep track of each student's progress.

In some ways this sounds like I am looking for a project management tool like MS Project or OmniPlan. But these seem too unwieldy and, perhaps, I would like to also have something that can help manage the chapters I have read and the comments I have given then.

So some basic features would be:


Collaborative software (preference of hosted on a server)
Task lists with deadlines
Timeline progression


I am curious what recommendations people have.
Like @Orion suggested, trello is great for organizing work. It is a kanban board where you express tasks as cards and you pile those cards in different decks; usual decks are TO-DO, DOING and DONE, but this is up to you. You can have different boards, one per student. It is collaborative and allows to grant access to a board to specific users (e.g. each student's board would be accessed by the student and you). you can open a card and write comments on it.

If you prefer not to depend on an external service, you can self-host a trello clone, like wekan.

Update: for Gantt charts within the kanban board approach, I see 2 options:


Pay for the Trello extension called elegantt.
Use the open source kanban board called kanboard. It is less visually appealing, but comes with a Gantt view out of the box. You can either host it yourself or subscribe to the hosted version.