Participants had been pre-selected and there were people from eight companies. All the participants were required to write an experience report about how they had scaled agile or transformed the organisation into a more agile form. The seats were arranged so that everyone could be in eye contact with all the others and discussion was very easy.
The day was packed rather full. We started already at 8:30 in the morning and finished around 17 o'clock in the evening. As we agreed not to share too much about each others practices and processes publicly, I won't get into details. But some interesting topics/practices I dare to share were the 24 h hackathon, group Backlog and a team building event where people had to self-organize into teams. Also, a topic that was common to almost all the participants was the Product Management. That's the not-so-trivial interface between business and development. Maybe that's the unicorn of Agile. ;)
I'd like to mention a very interesting facilitation technique called Open Season. Everyone had four cards: green, yellow, red and blue. Green indicated that you want to start a new discussion thread. Yellow meant that you still want to add something to the current topic. Red meant that you need to speak right away and blue that this is boring and let's move on. Red and blue were never used, but otherwise the conversation worked very well! Actually you can find a rather elegant guide on how to arrange a peer conference from this blog entry. I think we followed it very closely.
My best take homes were definitely the new contacts. Hopefully we can grow even more agile together! Also it was nice to get to know how other companies have been scaling agile. And by the way, if you ever think of arranging a conference like this, think no more. Do it! It will be great.
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