The Guide to Effective Agile Retrospectives

If you’re tired of having retrospective meetings greeted with groans and heavy, reluctant sighs or feeling like you’re rehashing the same old problems with no signs of improvement, the advice Mark shares with you will help make your retrospectives more effective.

There’s no need to have retrospectives that people hate and aren’t even useful – with a few tweaks, you can have meetings your team will look forward to, and start seeing real improvements and results!

Includes follow-up support emails to reinforce what you learned and help you make real changes right away.

Why This Book?

Our world is changing at a faster rate than ever, and the speed will only increase. Covid-19 gave us a taste of how vital it is to be able to quickly adjust. Scrum helps break change into manageable chunks and then gives us focus, with retrospectives as a critical tool in that arsenal for rapid adaptation. It’s worth learning how to use them properly.

In The Guide to Effective Agile Retrospectives, Mark shares his secrets to creating retrospectives that don’t suck!

You’ll learn about:

● Common misunderstandings about retrospectives – let’s clear those up

● Recommended techniques and activities to keep the meeting fun and engaging

● How to run retrospectives with distributed teams

● Why you need data for your retrospectives – what to gather, not gather, and what it can tell you

● Turning vague ideas like “We need to do better Unit Testing” into concrete experiments

● …and how to help these improvements actually happen

● Remedies for anti-patterns like: “All Talk, No Action”, “Perennial Problems”, and “ScrumMaster Hero”

Why this book? Because Mark was failing at Sprint Retrospectives before it was popular. After years of study and experimentation, his findings are now collected in this Guide so you don’t have to have to suffer the same pain.

Hint: This free eBook, and the accompanying email series, qualify for Scrum Alliance Education Units (SEUs).

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The instructor is very knowledgeable in the subject and kept us motivated and alert during the course. The course itself covers lots of material which is necessary for someone who wants to become a successful scrum master.
Elena RVirtual
Had little to no knowledge/training of Scrum & Agile and this was a great intro, with a couple of deep(er) dives. This course definitely helped me get introduced to Scrum and the world of Agile. While it's nice that scrum doesn't explicitly tell you how to do something, it definitely requires a significant amount of application in the real world to learn it.
Daneila DToronto
Thank you Mark, I have lots of ideas to bring back to the team. I appreciated your energy and sense of humor.
David COttawa
Mark, you're awesome! Certainly one of the best instructors I've had the pleasure of learning from. The course is absolutely helpful in building good foundational knowledge of scrum and especially the scrum master role.
Debbie LToronto
Excellent, material and discussion was perfect.
Jacques CVirtual
I find the instructor very knowledgeable and experienced in Scrum. He was very well organized and prepared for the course. He encouraged in class participation and elevated course content with real life examples. Well played! The course, its content and material covered Scrum very well.
Alena CVancouver
Very knowledgeable, informative, flexible in fitting situations into ideas.
Katie MOttawa
Whether you have 0 days or 10 years of product owner experience you're guaranted to learn a lot from this course.
Luke NOttawa
Excellent. Taught and gave a great understanding of Scrum.
Cameron MEdmonton
Mark is extremely knowlegeable, humorous, and an effective teacher. I feel far more knowedgeable about Scrum now than I did 2 days ago.
Jeremy GToronto
Very instructive course and thought provoking. I will use it in a unique way and it gave me approach that will allow it to work for me.
Mike GVancouver
Mark was a great instructor with the curse of knowledge (in a good way). Detailed examples, solid application advice, and adaptable during the course. Thanks!
Nick GToronto
Mark knows his stuff and delivers a highly interactive and animated training.
Ted MPrivate Client
Mark is very enthusiastic and responsive, good at eliciting participation, diverse exercises to keep us from getting bored, informative answers. Good focus on cross-functional teams and sharing non-dev where we fit in.
Carly HPrivate Client
Good. Has lots of experience.
Jimmy AEdmonton
Mark was an engaging and passionate instructor. I appreciated his concise explanations, and the time he took after his first day to discuss specifics about my organization with me.
Adam FOttawa
Fantastic instructor and couse. I learned so much, thank you!
Jeremy CKitchener-Waterloo
Mark did a great job. I learned way more than I thought. Scrum is way more than sprints and stand ups. It's a system for effective teams.
Joshua BVirtual
Great energy. Made the day pass with a mix of humour and data.
Matthew COttawa
Mark is a wonderful, energetic instructer who helps you to evaluate how you are working in your own environment. Then he helps you to figure out how to improve it.
Shelley COttawa
The course was structured in a way that allowed us to cover a lot of information in a manner that kept things interesting and allowed space to explore topics where the group was more interested.
Gino FOttawa
I found the instructor extremely engaging and very knowledgeable about the subject. The time flew by!
Granville GOttawa
Mark was fantastic. He really knows how to keep everyone engaged and I found the course really fun. Still subscribe to the belief that learning is done best when you're having fun so thank you :)
Sabrina AVirtual
Mark was great at explaining processes to entry level product owners, and is definitely one of the most knowledgeable people in the field. I'd be definitely interested in more of his courses.
Blake KVirtual
Awesome. Enlightment for pain points like overtime, too many WIP, motivation, etc.
Susie LVancouver
Mark has been a great facilitator, instructor, and extremely knowledgeable on teaching Scrum. Great analogies and references cited.
Wilfred MPrivate Client
Excellent. Would recommend any time.
Cindy IEdmonton
Course was very informative. You spoke to the entire group on a level everyone can understand.
Monica HPrivate Client
Mark delivered an excellent course, it was a value-packed 2 days.
Brent COttawa
Great background experience, a lot of passion in his speech, was able to answer even challenging questions.
Alex NPrivate Client
Disciplined, focused, knowledgeable.
James CKitchener-Waterloo
I enjoyed the hands-on nature of the course and Mark's presentation style. My mind was blown several times in the two days which was unexpected and completely awesome.
Heather OEdmonton
Awesome and objective! Careful not to influence how we work by answering other students.
Shawn MMontreal
Very knowledgeable and great communication skills to explain complex concepts in simple ways.
Ricard MToronto
Mark is a great instructor that gave us a lot of examples. Generated collaboration.
Francois NMontreal
This instructor was absolutely brilliant. He was very clear and knowlegable in all the areas. He was also very honest in his opinions.
Jonathan EOttawa
I cannot say anything but good things about the course, and have been telling many people in my org about it.
Hatem NVirtual
Mark is very easy to listen to. He is knowledgeable and keeps the class engaged. He has a lot of experience.
Lori CToronto
Good course. In the end it is going to be us to make [Private Client] an even better company and a even better product.
Steve MPrivate Client
Mark had a way of getting info across in both fun yet informative ways. He loves to challenge and be challenged which made it a pleasure.
Ross CPrivate Client
The course material is great and the way Mark presents it is very clear. Mark augments the material with real-world scrum experience across many components/orgs.
Scott NOttawa
Instructor was very welcoming and inclusive. He's very positive and polite. More importantly, he's knowledgable and experienced.
Dyan LToronto
Mark did an excellent job. I appreciated the hands-on nature of the training wherein we actually tried to do Scrum. He was patient handling all our questions and issues, and managed to keep us engaged despite being on Zoom.
Dan MVirtual
Highly recommend it. This was awesome. Thank you. Mark is a very good instructor.
Philippe CMontreal
The variation of types of exercises kept things interesting, much better than answer questions.
Michael GOttawa
Great instructor. Lots of good feedack throughout the session that was meaningful.
Petula NToronto
Mark is very engaging and keeps things interesting during the course.
Adam MToronto
Came into the course with basic practice and limited knowledge of theory. Mark has deep knowledge and experience of the material that is easily shared, conveyed, and put into practical settings /analogies. I appreciated the effort of setting a team working agreement during the course, how we communicated /voted throughout the course, and the respected timeframe granted to teach us the material. Many thanks Mark for sharing your time, knowledge, and humour with us. It was very interesting, albeit an intense 2 days of information. Not an easy feat in a virtual setting. Also, many thanks for the many links provided to learn further on our own time. The course material is large and wide. This was perfect to learn basic theory in practice. Further knowledge, training and experience is required to fully capture and understand the depth of SCRUM and Agile.
Chantal MVirtual
Mark was recommended to me from a colleague and I honestly was delighted of how much I learned from the course. I have been as a project manager for a number of years, and I really felt that I was able to understand how to apply this to my current work and also even how to work within my working style.
Joyce KVirtual
Excellent work, I have a lot of ideas and appreciate the way they were introduced.
John MEdmonton

Your Guide to Everything Scrum

Mark Levison spent 12 years as a ScrumMaster and Coach, helping teams by chance before he started to systemize it. Armed with an insatiable love for research, he has been studying and teaching Agile since 2001, introducing Scrum, Lean, and Agile methodology to a broad range of individuals and organizations. Mark has helped launch Scrum practice throughout Canada including Government of Canada departments, major financial and insurance institutions, healthcare agencies, and leading payroll, HR services, and software companies.

Students and communities benefit from Mark’s more than thirty years of experience in the IT industry and over two decades of Scrum and Agile expertise, as he brings his uniquely fun and effective teaching style to thousands of individuals and teams so they can be more effective.

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Focuses on the role of the team and the ScrumMaster. Get the skills and practical experience necessary to improve teamwork, take the exam, and advance your career with a certification that is in high demand today. Often the best fit for anyone new to Scrum.

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Learn on-the-job applications of key Scrum concepts, skills, principles, along with practical solutions that you can apply the next day for difficult, real-life situations.

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With focus on the challenges that real teams face, and tools to dig deeper. You don’t need more boring Scrum theory. You need something you can sink your teeth into to see immediate results.

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Use Scrum knowledge to standout at work, get paid more, and impress your customer, all without burning out.

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Learn the basics of using Generative AI as a tool to support Systems Thinking in your ScrumMaster role. Explore how to leverage GenAI to help uncover patterns, and think more deeply about the systems your team operates in.

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