Personnel effort collection is an important tool of IT-controlling. The paper outlines the managerial view of personnel data collection because the technical implementation is easy. This managerial view is a coin with two sides: The first is necessary f. e. for effective project management, the second side is that personnel supervision is possible. This contradicts to a motivating leadership style, which seems to be necessary for highly qualified staff, too. Based on experiences in a medium sized enterprise over several years, and the research state of the art it is shown, how a cooperative leadership style may be practiced anyway. In order to demonstrate the transparency, some examples show data of application systems' effort (development and maintenance costs), which can only be reported on the base of effort collection. .