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 course was fun, engaging, and highly responsive to participants. The complete lack of Powerpoint and bulleted lists was amazingly refreshing. Using a Sprint board to run the course was ingenious.
Robin GToronto
Great! Humour is a plus too!
Daryl BVancouver
Energetic, clear, helpful, inspiring, a great teacher.
Nadil POttawa
Good energy. Good examples. Kept the class on track.
Wilson CEdmonton
Mark was entertaining and kept the course moving. When we delved into detail the information was usually useful. We covered the basics and more, and it makes going back to work with reinforced skills and ideas on how to change our practices appealing instead of scary.
Samantha CMontreal
Solid grounding in Scrum and examples to apply it at work.
John CVancouver
I learned a lot and the content was far more enganging than I expected it to be. I come away with many improvements I can make to my organization. Thanks and well done.
Dan CKitchener-Waterloo
Excellent!! Thoughtful, well presented and very enthusiastic. Lots of great information packed into a concise program.
Rolland CKitchener-Waterloo
Mark was great at teaching the class. He really knows the course and it is obvious Scrum is second nature to him. Real life experience (in class exercises) are key to learning Scrum.
Cara CToronto
It was a really good way to understand the concepts of the Scrum Agile practice making us exercise and see how a real Agile org works.
Newton DMontreal
Mark is super knowledgeable and engaging. 10/10. Would recommend.
Steve BPrivate Client
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
Mark is very well read, with lots of breadth. Mark helped to challenge participants' ways of thinking that could impede scrum implementation.
Louise BOttawa
Mark did an excellent job facilitating the course and the content was very helpful. We covered a lot of ground in three sessions and the pre-learning was helpful too! Mark was patient and respectful and very supportive throughout the sessions. It was a pleasure to spend the time with Mark and to learn from someone who obviously knows his subject.
Debbie BVirtual
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
Mark is excellent. He uses examples that are very clear to everyone. He is patient and ensures everyone understands the material.
Emmanuel BMontreal
The instructor is clearly knowledgeable about scrum and other approaches. The course demonstrates the basics of scrum very well.
Matthew BToronto
Mark delivered an excellent course, it was a value-packed 2 days.
Brent COttawa
This training is beneficial, now it is clear to me what sprint goals, sprint reviews and all the other terms mean and how they can be used to inform, interact and engage team members, and how to help teams become more effective and high performing. I appreciate your speech and examples you provided in class, it helps me better understand the topics. Overall, this is a great and positive training. Thanks Mark!
Alice CVirtual
Very easy to get along with and makes points very clearly.
Jason PToronto
I applaud Mark's view on working in agile. I was able to clearly understand the fundamental core and roles of agile.
Adil SOttawa
Excellent. Well worth money and time.
David MOttawa
Provocative, amusing, thanks!
Stefan BPrivate Client
Good course and Mark is an awesome facilitator. Loved the way Mark conducted the training.
Gajan PKitchener-Waterloo
Excellent instructor. Left lots of room for us to think by ourselves. Great!
Kathleen LVancouver
Mark was great at reorganizing our organizational challenges. He was dynamic and kept me interested the entire time.
Jessica PPrivate Client
Mark is very knowledgeable. He is a great instructor.
Nitin PToronto
Very knowledgeable of the subject matter. Kept the pace of the course quick, which is good.
Tarek ROttawa
The class progress and keeping us engaged was great.
Bikash SToronto
The instructor Mark was very knowledgeable and provided lots of knowledge and examples. I learned a lot but did not realize what a huge topic this is.
Andrei DToronto
Very good experience, learned a lot, will be able to apply what I have learned, good job.
David KEdmonton
Mark provides clarity into the mystical world of Agile and Scrum with practical examples and Jedi wisdom. Add some psychosocial games into the batch and your in for an adventure. Training will test not just your ability to obtain facts, but leave you pondering the cavernous opportunities for the scum master to be an agent of organizational change.
Petrus BVirtual
Very knowledgeable and had many keen insights on the human behaviour aspect of scrum.
Brent ZVancouver
Amazing course! Love every second of it. Mark kept us all engaged. I knew nothing about agile/scrum and now feel well equipped to make changes at work. I'd love for the rest of my team to attend.
Shravan COttawa
Great instruction and high levels of interaction made for an enjoyable course. I gained a greater appreciation for the ScrumMaster role and the game of Scrum!
Kevin BToronto
Mark has an engaging style and a ton of experience which he shares freely.
Wanda PMontreal
Thoroughly knowledgeable about subject.
Enwei CVancouver
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
Great course! Interesting and fun. Not a moment of dullness.
Roma SOttawa
Brilliant approach to coaching.
Serguei LToronto
Very knowledgeable and examples that are applicable to our reality.
Allen SOttawa
Well spoken and obviously passionate.
Brian REdmonton
Very good at keeping interest. Very dynamic, engages easily with students.
Paul PMontreal
Awesome. Enlightment for pain points like overtime, too many WIP, motivation, etc.
Susie LVancouver
The instructor did a great job in getting people to participate and make sure everyone followed along.
George HPrivate Client
Great course! Very engaging and knowlegeable instructor.
Kolin BOttawa
Mark appears to be knowledgeable and highly experienced in Scrum and did a great job in creating more clarity for the group on complex concepts.
Ryan RVirtual
There was not a single bit of content that wasn't helpful.
Bruno PMontreal
Mark was very engaging and provides an excellent overview of the Scrum methodology.
Stephane LEdmonton
The course was excellent, loved the "agile" format. The instructor carefully included agile in most aspects of the course.
Kara SOttawa

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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