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 an excellent instructor, with a sense of humour that helped keep my focus (which is particularly challenging with the course being online over 3 days). Being able to run through simulated sprints to help reinforce the material was very helpful.
Micheal CVirtual
Love the course and the personality and knowledge you bring!
Steve POttawa
This was agreat intro to formal scrum fundamentals. Mark was always engaging.
John LKitchener-Waterloo
Instructor is very informative. Voice calming and clear with good balance of up/down/tone.
Hanh LToronto
Thoroughly knowledgeable about subject.
Enwei CVancouver
Provided excellent understanding of scrum, more difficult concepts with a very hands on approach.
Carmen CToronto
Mark did a great job of purposefully making us all feel included and engaged with his class. He added great clarity to the budding scrum process that has taken over in my workplace. I have seen many versions and perspectives on scrum values that deviate and distort how scrum would work, but I am now confident I can facilitate with my projects and team, using a much clearer scrum.
Charlene FVirtual
The course was well led, I found it very useful. Allowing the conversations to go on was nice as a lot of the issues were issues I was experiencing as well. I found Mark to be pleasant and extremely knowledgeable.
Jeff FVirtual
Awesome!! Very captivating, approachable and well spoken. Provoked conversation and posed questions in a manner that made you think
Katherine HKitchener-Waterloo
Hands on experience in the subject helps to communicate most of the inportant message throughout the course.
Wael FToronto
Made me THINK!!! Provided Framework
Mike CPrivate Client
Excellent job of teaching about using scrum. Very good job engaging the class and providing a fun place to learn. Full moneys worth.
Eric CToronto
Mark's enthusiam was contagious. His energy and humor brought Scrum alive! I enjoyed the examples and many aspects we covered.
Michelle HKitchener-Waterloo
Mark was really personable, engaging and put a lot of emphasis on our teams and their dynamic., I would recommend him again.
Riyad IPrivate Client
Mark is an awesome instructor! The course was very valuable and useful.
Chandni LToronto
Second course with Mark went great. I have to figure out how to afford more?
David HMontreal
Very engaging, interactive and lively CSPO virtual workshop. Mark is an excellent instructor and provided a lot of real world examples to help with understanding. Thank you for coaching. I will definitely recommend this course.
Cindy LVirtual
The course and instructor was excellent. The concepts were clearly communicated.
Edmund CEdmonton
He is very engaging and clear. It was easy to grasp the concepts and apply it to exercises.
Jamielyn CToronto
Mark is engaging and energetic. He made what could have been a dry topic quite enjoyable.
Paul BToronto
Great content, stories, anecdotes. Enjoyed instructor's enthusiasm and knowledge on the subject.
Paul JMontreal
Mark was very knowledgeable and walked us through Scrum using the actual technique. Very good technique.
Kevin COttawa
Instructor was great, very knowledgeable and open to questions. The course opened my eyes to scrum mechanics. I now understand what scrummaster in the team was attempting to do.
Sharon JEdmonton
Mark taught the course in-depth; I gained a lot of knowledge on facilitating a scrum team in achieving its goals. Thanks a lot for such an amazing presentation format.
Be-Done IVirtual
Mark is a very clear and engaging instructor. He is able to use examples and exercises to ground our learning.
Ayesha KOttawa
Well versed in knowledge and provided great "philosophical" thinking towards solutions to problems at work. Fun and approachable. Encourages solution formulation yourself.
Kang CKitchener-Waterloo
Lots of good information and exercises for a two day course. Instructor was clear and engaging in presenting concepts.
Marvin EPrivate Client
Exceptional presentation delivery that is clear, concise, and though-provoking, involving tremendous audience participation.
Norman EOttawa
Very good format and flow to course. Good idea to structure course in Agile format so we can experience Agile first hand.
Julia APrivate Client
Terrific! Well thought out responses to questions. Great base of experience. Practical approach to teaching. 10/10
Edward LOttawa
Mark did a fantastic job of concisely and thoroughly describing the POs.
Dean GToronto
The instructor was very good and demonstrated a clear knowledge of scrum and its principles. Hope to bring this knowledge with me into my company.
Kevin AToronto
Very informative and interesting introduction to the concepts and principles of Agile development and Scrum.
Michael HVancouver
Mark delivered what I think is one of the best adult learning, in a corporate training environment, I’ve experienced. And it was remote! It was engaging, entertaining and very useful. I was also very fortunate to have a great team which significantly enriched my experience.
Noah CVirtual
Awesome, really. Energizing course, I learned a lot and feel empowered - Thank you!
Benoit FOttawa
Mark was wonderful, prepared, entertaining, and accommodating. He effectively kept my attention and created good situations for the team to practice scrum. It felt like escape rooms. The course allowed me to use scrum, to put on different hats, and to envision how scrum would play out in my organization and previous teams. My questions were answered and then some.
Bryan LVirtual
Very knowledgeable instructor about scrum and software development in general.
Elizabeth GOttawa
It's mind changing.
Michael VToronto
I had a great time and I highly appreciated the experience demonstrated by the instructor.
Frederick LMontreal
Mark is an excellent trainer with examples and practices. Very organized and the best thing is his response to our questions with example, in addition, the amount of references that might help up improve as a scrum master.
Dona AMontreal
Course material provided was excellent for references and follow up. Instructor was energetic, dynamic, and full engaging.
Dinah MPrivate Client
Amazing! Given the time a lot was covered about Scrum.
Hanumanth Reddy POttawa
I love this course. It was incredibly helpful and throught provoking. I enjoyed the teach style and directness of the instructor.
Victoria MEdmonton
Mark and the course were able to give me a lot of different perspectives on how scrum can be applied. Mark is very knowledgable and has tech background [which] helped myself as we knew the sector better.
Nicholas LOttawa
Instructor was very clear.
May Lynn LEdmonton
Awesome. Enlightment for pain points like overtime, too many WIP, motivation, etc.
Susie LVancouver
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
The CSM course rocks! If you want to immediately jump into the action and improve as you go, this is it. You'll start off as a group of strangers, and find out how quickly you can build a high-performance team. And, if you separately want to read every comprehensive detail there is to know about scrum, Mark will share that with you too.
Nicole BVirtual
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
Excellent instructor provided engaging activites to help roleplay learning and provoke meaningful discussions.
Alice PEdmonton

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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Relatable Scenarios

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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Everything you need to earn your Scrum Alliance® ScrumMaster certification, including exam fee and membership, and so much more.

Practical Exercises

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.

Ongoing Support

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