Mastering Work Intake: From Chaos to Predictable Delivery

Regardless of whether you’ re creating, enhancing, or maintaining software products, work intake is a challenge you deal with constantly. Doing the right work at the right time can make or break your project, and there are surprisingly few resources to show you how to manage this process effectively. You need to know what your team is executing, what work is next, and the skill sets required to do the work.

Mastering Work Intake: From Chaos to Predictable Delivery focuses on the full pipeline that work follows as it enters and exits your organization, including the different types of work that enter at different levels and times. It is a must-read for agile coaches, Scrum Masters, product owners, project and portfolio managers, team members, and anyone who touches the software development process. Mastering work intake involves recognizing that it’ s easy to say “ yes” and much harder to say “ no.”

Key Features:

Combines theory with decades of practical experience in an easy-to-read format that describes how to take on the biggest challenge to teams and organizations today— work intake Helps readers diagnose and then solve problems themselves to deliver what work is needed when it’ s needed Illustrates how each level of an organization handles work intake and how roles interact throughout the process Details why the middle level of an organization's control over work intake is the most detrimental to getting value from agile Effectively describes sequencing, an often-overlooked part of the work intake equation WAV offers facilitated exercises to help you formulate ideas to address work intake challenges in your context and instructional material for classroom use (lecture slides, exercise solutions, etc.)--available from the Web Added Value Download Resource Center at jrosspub.com

Thomas M. Cagley, Jr. is a consultant, speaker, author, coach, and agile guide who leads organizations and teams to unlock their inherent greatness. He has developed estimation models and has supported organizations developing classic and agile estimates. Tom helps teams and organizations improve cycle time, productivity, quality, morale, and customer satisfaction, and then prove it. Jeremy Willets is a coach, speaker, and author who has spent the last decade working with people and teams to achieve greatness in the workplace. He started out as a technical writer on a Scrum team and quickly fell in love with Scrum and the Agile Manifesto values and principles. Since then, he’ s served thriving organizations as a Scrum Master, agile coach, senior agile coach, release train engineer, people manager, and mentor.