The first session of our Agile Mëtteg series was about “Agile Adoption & Transition”, as this was the highest ranked topic, based on the feedback we got from our website and participants of earlier sessions.
We also changed something elementary in the concept of the session: instead of doing a standard presentation with a projector and Powerpoint slides, we decided to go for a more interactive format, with the aim to include participants into discussions, so that we could learn from everybody’s experience.
After a short presentation about the host of the session, there was a round of introduction, when everyone presented him/herself a bit and his/her interest in agile. We had a really wide variety of businesses, roles and knowledge of agile.

Following, the two moderators, Sylvain Chery and Yann Gensollen, asked the participants to write down on sticky notes what they have in mind concerning the topic of the session, be it questions, concerns, known problems or whatever else. After that, each item was categorized under one of the following headlines:

• Awareness
• Desire
• Ability
• Promotion
• Transfer

This following Mike Cohn‘s book Succeeding With Agile. To not limit the participants to only think in this categories, this has been told after they had written down their ideas.

The participants brought up a lot of items, and it was very interesting to see the wide variety of questions, based on the different job roles and people point-of-views; someone even brought a prepared printout.

After everybody had put his notes on the wall and had given a short info on what it is about, it was asked if someone wants to comment directly on an item posted by someone else, and this raised a really big discussion; below are listed some of the questions/ topics that have been raised and discussed:

• Agile by “the book”?
• project fails because we did not do “full agile”
• why shouldn’t it be possible to successfully use just some agile tools/ things?
• how to start implementing scrum?
• if scrum is not possible (because of the people being not co-located, not matching team size, existing roles/ hierarchy), start kanban as “agile by the backdoor”
• don’t be dogmatic about agile, agile is not the “goal”, it’s the “way”
• agile is being blamed for failure, because only the “nice” things have been decided to be used
• what about using an agile pilot project?
• short trainings for team members at the beginning and a coach at their site can make a successful agile transition

The discussion about so many topics (much more than actually listed here) took the rest of the session´s timebox, but we achieved our primary goal for this year´s Agile Mëtteg as participants were more actively involved into the session and as a lot of valuable information has been exchanged between them.
Finally, we invited the participants to join the Agile Interest Group Luxembourg (Aiglu) or the Aiglu group on LinkedIn