[rogbar]

I too use Search for peoples' names, as a substitute for an additional "People" tag. The convention I use is the person's last name - followed by a first initial if that's necessary - enclosed in brackets at the end of the item. So it would look like this:

Waiting for estimate [smith]

Then I just search for the string "[smith" and all the items assigned to that person show up. (BTW, I use brackets because they look good, and don't require the shift key as parens or # do.)

I'd prefer to have a drop-down menu column with programmable names, but until that's a feature, this works okay for me.