I think PhD project management should explicitly tie everything back to the actual research goals, so that effort can be justified / prioritised against these.

I think PhD project management should explicitly tie everything back to the actual research goals, so that effort can be justified / prioritised against these. Source: I didn't achieve a PhD (I bailed early with an M.Phil) because our group project devolved into a poorly structured software development that contained numerous software rabbit holes. Once we'd gone down these, we never converged on a useful research output, as opposed to a massive codebase. That said, with the tools described here, our codebase would have been cleaner.