Two weeks ago, the first edition of the Agile Tour Lausanne took place. Luckily, Liip proposed me to sponsor some of my working time in order to prepare it.

It was the first conference I ever organized and I must say that if you are interested in doing something similar, just go for it! It is really a great experience!

Thanks to my co-organizers Yann Lugrin, Jonas Vonlanthen and FrĂ©dĂ©ric Noyer, we managed to get more than 60 attendees – which was beyond our expectations.

The Agile Tour organization

As introduced on its  website, the Agile Tour organization aims to “massively communicate about Agile, share their visions of Agile, federate and support people and local businesses in regions” once a year during October and November, all around the world.

Each event is self-organized and should involve as many local people (organizers, speakers, attendees) as possible; the goal to keep in mind being to “create leaderships” in a lot of regions of the world in order to “impact the professional world”.

The last part of the previous sentence is the most meaningful to me as it's exactly what we try to achieve every day at Liip.

In Switzerland, Lausanne is the third city organizing such an event – after Sierre and Geneva. Nevertheless, we thought there was enough space between Sierre and Lausanne to not overlap too much and also because the Agile Tour is not about competition, but about acting as a community.

In that spirit, we were even coached by the already existing Agile Tour Sierre team (thanks again Jean-Pierre Rey!) to benefit from their experience.

The conference – a short summary

We prepared the day so that it was mainly focused on real world experience feedbacks of Agile practices, and more specifically Scrum.

As we were expecting part of the attendees not having any background knowledge about the Agile topic, we decided to start the day with theoretical presentations.

It was a very good choice because it created a common knowledge basis for the following discussions which happened during lunch and coffee breaks.

Then in the afternoon, we organized talks showing real use cases. Companies like jobup.ch, l'Etat de GenĂšve and Liip presented how they deal with Agility in their daily business.

If you weren't able to join us, you can easily go through the speaker slides that you can find on the Agile Tour Lausanne website.

The conference – follow-up

As the attendees know, we asked all the participants to fill an evaluation form in order to gather feedbacks.

Hence, we will have soon our retrospective (an Agile event has no choice but to use Scrum itself) to check what people thought of their day and see how we can improve – and maybe an Agile Tour Lausanne 2012 will be announced afterwards.