Work management and the big brother feeling

I just watched again Terry Gilliam's "Brazil", an old love of mine. It makes me think about the application we produce, which can be perversely seen as a mean for worker control. Perversely? Well, if you are so silly to think that people working should be "controlled", instead of motivated, you have a problem. Surely you shouldn't be in management; maybe read "Peopleware", maybe go do some public service.

The problem and the opportunities start in managing one own time and aims (projects), not other people's. That's why contemporary project management is more related to personal productivity than to say, Pert charts. It's as if management should come as a sum and elaboration of infos voluntarily provided by different and scattered sources. Until not long ago, there was no source from where to get information, so the application had to provide a space to fill. Now we have somehow to make it fill by itself.

And the need for a group tool for managing shared work is ever increasing, as work get more and more complex...