What's the rational behind dehumanizing people and calling them “resources” in project management?

Question

I'm a software developer. One thing I learned about this a long time ago is that no two developers are the same (experience, skills, etc.). What I learned about project management is that it's ultimately about managing people.

But all PM activities revolve around an uniform term of "resource". I'm a resource, my colleague is a resource, that hardware down the hall is a resource, etc.

I might see project management as an alternative career path, so I'm willing to learn. I want to start with understanding the rational behind dehumanizing people (with all of their different human characteristics and abilities) and calling them just plain "resources".

Answer 1

Managing your resources--making tough decisions on how to deploy your financial, tools, materials, and humans--to minimize the threat of failure and maximize the likelihood of success AND treating people kindly, humanly, and with respect are two different things.

It is YOUR definition that makes a resource a thing. Dictionary.com defines it as: a source of supply, support, or aid, especially one that can be readily drawn upon when needed.

That certainly can apply to humans.

The bottom line is, however, that managing is about the deployment of resources and behind many of those decisions are ones that can be quite inhumane. We are all different with different strengths and weaknesses, our collective performance varies, our individual performance varies, we are the least reliable resource of all resources, all of us can be replaced, and no project or company exists so that a human can have a job; it exists to make a product or service to make money or some other goal. We are simply one of the many enablers to achieve that goal.

It is cold and callous and we all want more loyalty and love from a company, but that only exists in HR literature designed to attract talent. It ends when you sign your contract.

EDIT: When you are managing a performance capability, your goal is to have repeatable, sustainable, and predictable performance. This means all of the enablers you use, the machines and tools, the availability of funds, infrastructure, environment, AND people, need to be replaceable, not unlike a tire. If a cog craps out, you reach into the drawer, grab another, screw it in, and turn the machine back on. Indeed with minimal variances, you can pretty much predict the same level of performance you had with the other cog. If John Smith craps out--quits, dies, gets arrested and convicted--you need to reach in the drawer....

Of course, it is much harder than that, but that's the mentality IF you want repeatable, sustainable, and predictable performance.

If you understand the performance curve, whether you think it is normally distributed or positively skewed, most of your human performance that you will likely get will be severely average. That is what the curve means. We, however, like to kid ourselves that we found superstars, and our hiring selection process continues to find superstars, despite it being statistically unlikely. But if you think about, superstars are the antithesis of repeatable, sustainable, and predictable results. That is because, if your superstar leaves (assuming you really had one), then the likelihood of replacing said superstar is quite low, leaving your performance capability suffering.

All this sounds like I dehumanize. Maybe it is. But again, I do not operate a project so that people have a place to work. If one does not perform, they get replaced just like a cog. And I turn the machine back on. If I happen to get a superstar, icing on the cake, but I do not rely on him/her. Because he/she will leave, die, get sick, get arrested, disappear.

Answer 2

Formal Definition

Wikipedia defines a resource as follows:

A resource is a source or supply from which benefit is produced. Typically resources are materials, money, services, staff, or other assets that are transformed to produce benefit and in the process may be consumed or made unavailable.

Why People are "Resources"

People are the source of creativity and human labor on a project. They supply minds, hands, and man-hours to the project, which (theoretically speaking) is what creates value.

They are also finite resources. If someone is 100% committed to Project Foo for eight hours a day, that person is generally unavailable to work on Project Bar—except in organizations that indulge in wishful thinking, of course. While working on embiggening a thingamabob for Project Foo, they are unlikely to be truly available to stomp grapes, support Project Bar's widgets, or any other time-sucking outside activity; individual utilization is a zero-sum game.

Emotional Freighting

While not part of the formal definition, the word "resources" does carry a connotation that people are viewed as fungible assets. This is largely due to the fact that many organizations treat people this way, rather than because human resources are truly interchangeable.

Teams and individuals are resources for the project—and valuable ones, at that. The Agile Manifesto tries to bring teams, individuals, and interactions to the forefront to combat the notion that people are interchangeable cogs manufactured to precise tolerances.

At the end of the day, though, the negative freighting of "human resources" is a result of an organization's poor people management, or a person's past experience with some other company's poor treatment of its people. The negative connotation isn't really intrinsic to the term as it's used within the project management profession.

Answer 3

It's just a word. The real test is in how the PMs treat you. I prefer to say "team members" myself, so I understand where you're coming from. However, I don't know a single PM that doesn't think of their team members as real people. It's generally when you're just a line item on some executive report that you're thought of as a dehumanized resource and in that case we're not talking about personal interaction, so I don't think it matters much.

Answer 4

There is 4-M for running any projects. They are Man, Machine, Material & Money. Money is spent for the first three. So, they are referred as Resources. In Project Management, we do have other term 'Stakeholders', which also includes Team members along with sponsors and others. We don't use the word 'Resources' in that context. It has to be seen from contextual specific.

If you see project triangle, you have scope, time & cost. Only time and cost are associated with resources. Whereas scope is not DIRECTLY associated with resources. It is being associated through time & cost only. Term 'resource' is used contexts where cost & time play role, which machine, man & materials.

These were borrowed from the core manufacturing industries when processes were introduced to control and integrate man, machine & materials to improve productivity, and quality. This has been carried over decades. You need to look at this from the age of Deming & Co. To remove this feeling of dehumanizing, industry has term 'Human Resources' :)