I’m a big Outlook fan. In the process of defining the task, you can specify who is responsible and who just needs to know about it. When you’re done defining the task, emails are automatically sent to the responsible and FYI people. You can set a reminder for yourself to check on status. And you can set a reminder for the people who are responsible for the task. The responsible person can indicate when the task has been started, what percentage of the task is done, problems encountered during the task, etc. all of which you can check real-time. Downside: you have to have a PC with Outlook and so do all the people performing tasks. And people need to be conscientious.
Oh, now there's the hard part.