Why to use the word capacity instead of resource when referring to people

 

There are many in the Agile community that believe referring to people as ‘resources’ is insulting. I know many people in non-Agile communities that don’t mean to be demeaning when they refer to people as resources. To be safe, I typically never call people resources.

But there’s another reason not to call people ‘resources’. When you have “resources” it makes sense to utilize them, even over utilize them. This is the wrong focus for Flow and Lean.  We are not trying to utilize things as over utilization causes many problems.

We are trying to use whatever capacity we have on the most important tasks.  So instead of resources, I do more than just calling people 'people'. I always talk about capacity. This not only will not be interpreted negatively, it reminds us that people have a certain level of capacity.  We can more easily understand that overloading capacity is bad than we can understand that over utilization is bad.