One of our goals when building our new group management app was to liberate people form the strict client/project/item construct. Before modern operating systems, your only hope to find your files again was to stick strictly to a folder/subfolder routine that sometimes found you nesting items dozens of levels deep. Thankfully we’ve moved on. Today we have all sorts of ways to make virtual collections of files on the fly. We have great search that lets us find things regardless of location. It’s all about sorting.

Despite being built on top of fast robust databases, web based PM apps treat information with the same old nested organization we used in the past. It just doesn’t fit how we work, and it for sure doesn’t take advantage of the technology.

• What if you need to see all of the items that a person on your staff completed last week across all projects?
• What if you want to see all of the files uploaded this week across 3 projects?
• what if you want to see all of the incomplete todo’s you created today across all projects?

We’re sure you can think of lots more that would be immensely useful. Simply having the ability to sort items out of context will change the way you think about project management. It will let you quit managing the projects, and start managing the people.