I noticed this, too. Referring to people as "people", not "resources", is my favourite way of trolling managers during meetings. I don't do it just because cal

I noticed this, too. Referring to people as "people", not "resources", is my favourite way of trolling managers during meetings. I don't do it just because calling people "resources" is dehumanizing, I also do it because I think this attempt of reducing complexity is naive. You can treat people the way you treat other items on a timesheet, sure, and you might even get a great deal of satisfaction from it, because you're so cold-hearted and professional that a drop of blood just harvested from your aorta could turn the global warming problem into a neverending winter problem if it's dropped over the North Atlantic. That doesn't make it a smart thing to do though. People aren't resources in the classical sense. They aren't predictable and "budgeting reserve time" is not the correct approach to deal with that. Encouraging and nurturing the kind of behaviour that a project depends on is a far better approach.