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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Mark was very knowledgeable and a good communicator.
Boris VOttawa
Very engaging instructor. Used many real-life examples.
Laura OPrivate Client
Extremely enlightening. Put a lot of elements into proper context. Great foundation.
Yvan NMontreal
Fantastic course. I was really happy with the structure, the breaks, and the group interaction. I've taken other online courses like this before and really felt like there was a good balance between listening, discussions, applying the knowledge, and pauses.
Amanda PVirtual
It is very well organized and timed. The teacher has a really deep, hands-on knowledge about the subject.
Alberto MPrivate Client
Mark was a great instructor, really made the content easily understandable and great at answering questions.
Melanie MVirtual
Excellent instructor. Left lots of room for us to think by ourselves. Great!
Kathleen LVancouver
Mark did a great job of keeping the class engaged and deployed many useful techniques to get the course material across.
Tharaneesan NPrivate Client
(Instructor was) very pragmatic and opened your mind and steer conversation, so you can figure it out, instead of reading through material.
Priya PPrivate Client
Elegant and quirky faciliation makes for enjoyable and engaging learning.
Donald PToronto
Mark is a great instructor! He is knowledgeable and has experience, so he knows what he is talking about! Highly suggest his course!
Anthony MVirtual
I recommend all newbees and Agile to take Mark's class. End of the day, you will walk out with confidence.
Hema PKitchener-Waterloo
This course was one of the best I have experienced, because we did everything instead of listening to someone talk.
Doris PPrivate Client
Really dynamic! Use scrum tools to control the flow of the course which is a good example.
Marc LMontreal
Great course! My future teams will be thankful to be a high performance team.
Filipe PVancouver
Mark was a great commincator of the concepts. He practiced what he preached by using SCRUM to team.
Darren MMontreal
Lots of information and data for a great walk through about the agile methodology.
Pierre-Michel AMontreal
I had the best two days of practical training on Agile. Instructor has logical answers to my questions.
Angie EEdmonton
Excellent communicator and educator who encourages students to think through questions. Thorough course material to get student "Ready to Rock"
Sue LToronto
I enjoyed taking this course with Mark. Examples given in class were relatable to the majority of the group. He was engaging, leaving nobody left out (ensuring everybody participated).
Jennifer MPrivate Client
Mark did a great job. I appreciated that a) he was coming from a strong development background and b) had an obvious passion about Scrum and the benefits it could bring to development.
Adam MVirtual
Very interesting course, useful information, good class structure and handouts.
Jialin MPrivate Client
Very helpful and clear. Mark is good at pushing the boundary with good illustration.
Terry NToronto
Really liked the approach by Mark to apply Scrum methodology to this training. Also Mark was available to answer questions and patient.
Damien JOttawa
Instructor was very passionate about subject and links theory to concrete examples.
Jean-Philippe BMontreal
Mark is a great teacher and is very good at engaging people. Really gets the spark going!
Julien LMontreal
Mark made the class enjoyable. I was initially dreading a 3 day course. After the first day I knew that I could live through the course.
Dickie BPrivate Client
Mark leads the class on an explanation of the topics and provides traps to ensure students can learn from practice.
Peter CPrivate Client
Exceptional presentation delivery that is clear, concise, and though-provoking, involving tremendous audience participation.
Norman EOttawa
Excellent! Packed in a lot in the limited time without making it overwhelmning.
Ayan KMontreal
Mark is totally wonderfully weird and knowledgeable.
Sarah MOttawa
Mark was very engaging and provides an excellent overview of the Scrum methodology.
Stephane LEdmonton
Excellent source of knowledge and provided additional resources. Helped with real examples
Sean OPrivate Client
Fantastic. Very engaging and helpful blend of both Scrum and general business advice.
Dace DOttawa
Mark harnessed the power of our diverse perspectives/skills/experience to create agile team enacting scrum as we applied our learning. This applied learning led us to knowledge sharing, trust, and mastery.
Danica MOttawa
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
Greatly impressed by the teaching style and format of the course. Much appreciate the sprint style format and the engagment level of the instructor.
Hatem NOttawa
Refreshing, enlightening, funny, engaging, instructive.
Richard DPrivate Client
It was great! Very well explained and engaging.
Donald HToronto
Instructor was extremely well prepared, know the material inside and out. Always had a good response for every question. And had a great sense of humor
Christian BPrivate Client
Interesting facilitation of a topic that could have been not so interesting.
Jeff MEdmonton
Great background experience, a lot of passion in his speech, was able to answer even challenging questions.
Alex NPrivate Client
Whether you have 0 days or 10 years of product owner experience you're guaranted to learn a lot from this course.
Luke NOttawa
Very enthusiastic and diplomatic. Very knowledgeable. Course was enjoyable.
Chris MKitchener-Waterloo
Knowledgeable, prepared, interactive.
Anca MMontreal
The content of the course covered most of things I was looking for. Mark is a knowledgeable instructor and was able to answer all of the queries the class had.
Ramandeep MEdmonton
Very good and useful information. I like the format (no boring Powerpoint) and doing the meeting as a sprint was great.
Fred BPrivate Client
Instructor was excellent. Provided an environment of communication.
Nathalile LOttawa
10/10 Loved the atmosphere he created, kept us engaged, able to send important messages, did not overwhelm us.
Biljana CPrivate Client
Using Scrum to teach Scrum. Perfect.
Andrew COttawa

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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