ABSTRACT
As people are vital to enable organizations to achieve sustained success perhaps they should be perceived as capital and not resources. The economic climate affects the availability of capital and the sustainability of remuneration levels, and therefore a project that was going to employ many more people may not now go ahead or the competition makes it no longer economical to undertake certain work in-house. Determining the people needed is an act of planning: anticipating the number of people of various abilities that are needed to achieve the organizational objectives as planned. As the process matures, the number people of specified abilities required for a given process output should be recorded and retained as reference data so that every time a new job/project has to be estimated, the estimates will be based on objective evidence. Providing the people needed means acquiring and deploying the human capital that has been identified as being needed in the budgets.
