Everybody is different; and everybody wants to work differently. One of the problems when trying to organize work, maybe also by introducing a management tool, is that you have to find a way to meet different needs.

The low access level and absence of security checks of social tools is one of the reasons why they are easy to accept in a working team, but of course they have limitations which will emerge even after a short time.

An answer may seem be to adopt an application with a minimal set of features, so that everybody will agree on using those; but actually this is a way of temporarily hiding the problem, because work management involves a lot of kinds of different actions, and different people (production director, expense manager, those that get things done, ..) find different actions the essential ones, so everybody agrees that few features are essential, only everybody points to different ones.

So if you want to go towards a minimal agreed set of features, the best thing is not to use a specialized tool at all. Use just Excel and paper, you'll be fine.

Our approach with Teamwork is that if the software has to be useful at all, it has to be compatible with different ways of working. And in this, it is uniquely powerful: you can model projects as trees, as flat lists, as just a bunch of issues, as a business process or flow, ... . You can assign the same task to many people, or pick one task one person, or associate one task to many many issues, or just use to-dos and record all worklog on a single project, or whatever crazy way of working you prefer. You can record worklog on week time sheets, or by issue, or on a counter, of from Subversion commits, or from Twitter twits...
You can manage meetings from Teamwork's agenda, or from Outlook, or from Google calendar, or from any iCal client, and so on...

In the picture you see the world’s first working Difference Engine; it has nothing to do with the topic, but looks nice :-)