5 Key Takeaways from “Mastering Work Intake”

This book should prompt you to dig in and find out exactly how the important work of your organization is getting prioritized.

I recently read the just-published book Mastering Work Intake by Tom Cagley and Jeremy Willets. I highly recommend that you read the book and leverage the insights to better understand and improve how your own organization handles work intake. This article outlines my 5 key takeaways from the book.

Work intake is an important and frequently overlooked topic for many teams and organizations. For years, many organizations have focused on simply keeping everyone busy. Which is dumb if you think about it.

Thankfully now the focus is shifting from 100% resource utilization to making sure that people are working on the most important and valuable items first. That places Work Intake front and center and makes this book by Tom Cagley and Jeremy Willets more timely than ever.

Key Takeaways

#1 — Understand Exactly What Is Meant by Work Intake

In case you are not familiar with this term, work intake is how work is identified in organizations and brought into teams to be worked on. Cagley and Willets discuss how they landed on the term Work Intake vs. Work Entry which may be more common yet abrasive. As they noted, Work Entry is forceful and aggressive. The authors felt that Work Intake was more inclusive of both how work is acquired and how much work is taken on by a team.

Work Intake refers to how the work is identified, prioritized (or not), sequenced, and attributed to a team. In agile teams, the work should be pulled as the team has capacity. Unfortunately, I think we all recognize that it is just as common for work to be pushed on teams without regard for their capacity.

Cagley and Willets put work intake under a microscope to show how this important part of the process is often ad hoc, which can lead to people working on the wrong items, or the right items at the wrong time.

#2 — Effective Work Intake is Not Only Important, it is Essential