Call to Action : People Are Not Resources
A colleague Bill Ryan brings up a great point.
It is time to stop calling people resources. Humans are not resources, they are humans - complex things that differ from one another in very subtle and nuanced ways.
Coal is a resource. Steel is a resource. Pork-bellies, and everything else that trades at the Chicago Board of Trade, is probably a resource. Resources bring to mind commodities - things that are easily replaceable parts in a machine or system. Things that are uniform, and do not vary from instance to instance.
Humans, as much as we try, tend not to fit that mold. Project managers make the mistake time and time again of playing with project plans and people - replacing people in different parts of the project plan, because, well, they are simply resources that should each be able to do a given task in about the same amount of time. And then we wonder why it doesn't work.
When we staff projects, we know we have to tailor the team to the environment. We know that people are not fungible. We know that, even two developers are of similar capability and skill set, if you swap the parts of project they are working on, are going to have to learn a new code base, acclimate to the new team they are working with, and so forth. Viewing people as resources, literally, costs the company money, because it encourages this "thrashing" in project plans that increases the overall person-hours involved in the project.
Let it be known that people, themselves, *hate* being referred to as resources. Nobody aspires to be a resource, they aspire to do something important - to make a difference, and usually, to do so in a way that is not completley anonymous. Being a resource implies a level of anonymity - that you are a cog in a corporate machine stamping out a product.
This may all be fine and good - you might say that you want easily replacable parts in your effort to get a solution delivered without having to deal with that squishy "people stuff". But if you want people to take ownership over results, having them be "anonymous resources" as part of the effort, and giving them no upside in the project with respect to their personal brand, probably wont work. Most people intuitivley understand that they certainly get the downside to their personal brand - if you screw up, you get the blame. So to not have a role in the upside will not appeal to the kind of people you want on your project - the 10x developers and the innovators who go the extra mile to make extraordinary results happen. Those kind of people have options, and when they know that one project involves upside to their brand, and another involves only downside, it does not take a 180 IQ to figure out which option such a person is going to choose.
So - a humble proposal. We need to stop calling them resources, and use the other fine name we have for them, people. We need people to do X, Y, and Z, rather than resources to do X, Y, and Z. "Human Resources", as a department name, is fine. But we need to stop calling individual humans resources - it is demeaning, and in anything but the worst employment markets, gives you a competitive disadvantage.
And in the name of all that is good and right, do not use the term resources in a job ad.