Panoramas with people in them are much more interesting than without.  I get a kick out of seeing the expressions on people's faces as they wonder what the heck I am doing.

Here is a very simple example of dealing with people in panoramas.  If you are not able to take the entire sequence in one or two seconds, you need to shoot several pictures at each position.  This will give you material to work with as you cut-n-past and mask your images.  I do all this work prior to stitching.  I sometimes need to touch up the image in Photoshop after stitching.  All of the following pictures are close up crops of the originals.  All images were shot with a Sigma 8mm f3.5 lens mounted on a Nodal Ninja R1 and a Manfrotto monopod.
This is the right edge of the left image. This is the left edge of the right image.
   
Here is how they stitched.  
 
As you can see, the building stitched fine, the people did not.

I started masking out the right hand image in order to save the shadow of the guy in the orange shirt.  As I continued masking parts of the right and left picture, the results were not good.  Masking one area in one picture would cause issues with the other. 

I decided to look through my other pictures to find one that I could use to patch the right hand image. Here is what I ended up using.
 
While capturing this sequence, I waited until the edges of the pictures (where I thought the seam would be) to be clear of people.  The picture above has a clear view of the seam.  The three people on the right have not walked directly in front of the camera just yet.  I used the center part of this image to do the patching.
Here is the original image. Here is the edited image.
   
Now I could mask both left and right images and end up with a good stitch.  Here is the final stitch. The original stitch. 
The three women in the back between the white pillars are my wife and two daughters.  There is no way I could leave them out of the final panorama.
Notice the shadow of the guy in the center wearing the grey Nebraska shirt.  His shadow is not well defined, but fades a bit.  Not perfect, but good enough.  The clouds moved between shots so the ground color changed a bit.  I could work on this, but there comes a point at which you need to walk away.  The little details can drive you crazy!
I always take at least 5 pictures at each position so I can have material to work with.  Watch the seams for a clear shot.  Sometimes you will have to combine 3 pictures into one in order to fix the final panorama.

The completed panorama can be viewed here.  This panorama was shot at Pompeii, in the Forum.  Mt. Vesuvius can be seen in the background of the final panorama.