Guy Maslen: “Once upon a time there was a project…”

Real projects can be complex and messy things, especially when it comes to forecasting. Guy is going to talk about a recent project and look at how pragmatic decision making led to accruing “hidden” technical debt, which had to be paid back (with interest) down stream.

He’ll unpack the trade-offs that lead to technical debt from a Kanban perspective, as well what happens to the team delivery from a systems thinking and context switching perspective.

He’ll wrap up by showing how the data they collected matched what they might have predicted, and what they might need to think about when making better project forecasts.

Bio Guy
Guy fell into agile and lean software development accidently after working as a geophysicist for 15 years, and then realised that most of how he had been working was about bottlenecks, flow and cycle-time.
He’s worked as a product manager for technical geophysical software, led Geonet through a restructure and worked as a Scrum Master at NZDF. For the last three years he's been working at the Tertiary Education Commission, where he's currently one of the Technical Delivery Leads, focussing on a new Databricks Data Lakehouse and the Business Analytics teams.

The organiser Silke
Silke is a Flow Expert, Project Consultant, Accredited Kanban Trainer, Kanban Product, Coaching and Management Professional in New Zealand and certified facilitator of all versions of the Okaloa Flowlab. Her public classes "Flow Manager", "Team Kanban Practitioner", "Scrum Better with Kanban", "Kanban System Design", "Kanban Systems Improvement", "Kanban for Design and Innovation" (the Product Manager / Product Owner / Project Manager path of the KMP credential) can be found under her Kanban University profile. https://kanban.university/kuapps/#/user-profile/user/24536. She has trained many people and organisations in public and in-house classes around New Zealand.
As an intercultural trainer, she has written the two only intercultural books about New Zealand in German, one of them translated into English. http://kanbannewzealand.co.nz/. Her new book in German is due at the end of October 2025: https://wahlheimat-neuseeland.de/2025/07/09/fettnaepfchenfuehrer-neuseeland/
She has previously worked in Scrum, SAFe, Nexus, LeSS and waterfall contexts as a Business Analyst, Tester, Scrum Master and Agile Coach. Her original background is (investment) banking / trading.
She loves networking, intercultural topics, kite-surfing, running, gym, sauna, tramping, languages, learning new things, going on roadies with her van, wine, good food, hanging out with friends.