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 exceptional and very fun, engaging, and informative training session
Kris KKitchener-Waterloo
Mark is a great instructor and his unique British style made the two day training more interesting.
Jing WEdmonton
Very informative and interesting introduction to the concepts and principles of Agile development and Scrum.
Michael HVancouver
Amazing! Friendly, funny, smart, open-minded individual. Great job, Mark!
S M Tadmir CToronto
Excellent instructor provided engaging activites to help roleplay learning and provoke meaningful discussions.
Alice PEdmonton
Enthusiasm. Knows his material.
Isabelle LOttawa
Excellent. Loved the real world experience brought to the course.
Jason MOttawa
Excellent course! Not a wasted minute!
John MOttawa
Mark has helped me learn Agile in a fun way. The hands on experience have added value for a non-agile user like me.
Keerthiga NEdmonton
I thought it was extremely effective. It re-enforced some good practices already in place but showed what is missing in my environment.
Robert JEdmonton
Great job Mark! Training was excellent. I now know what REAL scrum is and feel equipped to continue learning and practicing true scrum principles.
Cornelus MVirtual
Mark is very insightful, knowledgable, and humourous. The topic was well covered and a delight to engage with. Great balance of peer interactions and instructor led discussions.
Peter HOttawa
This course was a real eye opener and hope it will not be like preaching in the desert. You are a great orator and would love to listen to your thoughts for hours.
Marc-Andre LMontreal
Kept audience engaged, and kept course relevant to entire group. Brought Scrum into how the course was taught! (Neat!)
Steve BOttawa
Knowledgable and engaged the trainees to think and share their ideas.
Carol BPrivate Client
Excellent course, great depth of knowledge from the instructor, well paced and well run.
Kurt OEdmonton
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
Great course. Covers the essentials and deals with a lot of potential situations and ways to handle them. Mark had great room presence and was a great communicator.
Michael VEdmonton
Mark is an amazing communicator and is able to clearly deliver information. He uses good examples to illustrate how something should be done and shouldn't be done. He clearly has an expert level grasp of the SCRUM process. The course was fantastic, this was the best and most captivating training I've ever attended. Most times when participating in training there is a sense toward the end that you would like it to be over. At the end of this training I felt like I wanted it to continue.
Marc VVirtual
Very passionate and knowledgeableinstructor, and very able to answer any question.
Zain JEdmonton
Wonderful course and instructor. Fantastic mix of theory and pragmatism. Concepts applicable to non-software development. Very valuable. Well done!
Margaret UEdmonton
All topics were covered and mastered incredibly well. Could confirm his wide knowledge and experience using and explaining scrum.
Lenin QMontreal
Mark was very knowledgeable; I really appreciated the examples that he shared with the group. Thank you!
Suzanne AVirtual
Thank you Mark! Up until last week I knew nothing about Scrum and now I know quite a lot. Took my test this morning -- just as you said, it was not that complicated and panicking was not warranted. Excited to apply the new skills in practice!
Anastasia KVirtual
Great agenda, engaging instructor, relevant examples and exercises. 10/10 rating
Ed AVancouver
Mark was exceptional in introducing us to the Scrum world. Contents in the Mural was well formulated, informative and crisp. Mark was open to discussion and provided alternative options for real time issues faced by participant. He was able to create traps so that we can get the real insight of scrum's events. Overall, I am amazed the way Mark covered the whole session. I am looking forward to go through his new upcoming book.
Birendra KVirtual
Mark is extremely knowledgeable and well-spoken. Course is well facilitated/structured overall.
Matthew TVancouver
Course gave me clarity on the basic principles of Scrum. Drove home the power of 'team'.
Lia PToronto
Mark did a fantastic job. [Private Client] was a unique challenge of a long history with hardened habits, as well as a very peculiar definition of Agile and SCRUM.
Imran APrivate Client
Mark was an extremely engaging and informative instructor. I enjoyed all of the aspects of the course/topics covered. I look forward to continuing my Agile education because of this course.
Cailey RToronto
Really great! Fun, lots of examples & ways to keep people engaged.
Dave VPrivate Client
Mark is excellent. Made the course very helpful!
Stan TVancouver
Mark was engaging and patient. He got everyone involved and kept spirits and energy levels high.
David BPrivate Client
Excellent course overall, instructor was professional, knowledgeable, articulate, and sensitive to different needs among the students.
Alex VPrivate Client
Great! Very enthuiastic instructor and made learning a breeze.
Dalbir SKitchener-Waterloo
Mark is simply a very knowledgeable and engaging instructor. Great experience.
Emad MPrivate Client
Mark did a great job and was impressed how well it worked virtually and not in person!
Jennifer PVirtual
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
Well presented material, excellent real world examples of applying scrum framework.
Brian BOttawa
Mark was great! He's very knowledgeable and his understand of SCRUM is deep and polished. I enjoyed the product owner course.
Joe OEdmonton
Great content, stories, anecdotes. Enjoyed instructor's enthusiasm and knowledge on the subject.
Paul JMontreal
Mark's facilitation style was extremly engaging and his knowledge deep. I like the way he builds the scrum framework into the training workshop agenda. No power point, lots of discussion and releveant examples. I appreciate very much the time Mark took to address my question for which he had no existing reference.
Renee OKitchener-Waterloo
Mark was awesome, very enthusiastic about the subject and more importantly was very knowledgeableabout Scrum Master role and Scrum.
David OPrivate Client
Mark was great and full of recommendations. He was also very knowledgeable and able to answer all our questions.
Chris MPrivate Client
Mark did a great job of keeping the class engaged and deployed many useful techniques to get the course material across.
Tharaneesan NPrivate Client
Great facilitator, very knowledgeable.
Jay TEdmonton
Content, Pace, Instructor: all 5/5 stars
LeAnne SOttawa
Excellent instructor. Left lots of room for us to think by ourselves. Great!
Kathleen LVancouver
Clever, concise SM training that delivered all the essential elements needed to start using Scrum at work right away.
Sabrina KOttawa
Very knowledgeable, very friendly, very easy for the rest of us to learn from.
Doru TToronto

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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