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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Very effective and experienced instructor. Well organized.
Sam MOttawa
Mark was full of energy. There was never a moment where what we were discussing wasn't interesting.
Swetha RKitchener-Waterloo
Mark Levison is great - Excellent knowledge of the subject and a great virtual training plan. Thanks a lot.
Rajesh DVirtual
Mark Levison’s Agile Pain Relief was a wonderful, immersive introduction into the world of Scrum. He is an engaging, thoughtful and well prepared instructor. The course activities were interactive, informative and really served to engrain and apply Scrum knowledge. I would highly recommend this course to anyone looking to become a CSM.
Wes KVirtual
Mark was knowledgable and provided us with a good base to start with.
Maria Noah MPrivate Client
Mark inspires you to make yourself better in the roles which makes your workplace better. I wish he could come to my place of employ to get us setup to succeed. Might have to look into that.
Jackie MEdmonton
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
The instructor was very adaptive and knowledgeable. I respect how the instructor worked and would take another course with him in the future.
Johnny KEdmonton
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 was very good. I appreciated that he was able to provide good examples and explain concepts clearly.
Valerie EVancouver
Amazing experience. Mark is a great inspirational mentor. Teaches me how to approach problems and think out of the box.
Ben HKitchener-Waterloo
The instructor demonstrates solid knowledge on Agile and scrum fundamentals. The course is interesting and easy to follow.
Don LEdmonton
Fantastic 2 days. Loved the incorporation of practical exercies. Lots of feedback and helps you understand how people think.
Tony KVancouver
Mark was great !! Very thorough - his passion for what he does came through. I appreciated his organization and engagement with the team. He was awesome.
Rene EVirtual
The combination of hands-on practice and excellent facilitation style made this course enjoyable, useful and very applicable to my day to day life as a Project Manager. The content was carefully curated and meaningful discussions were had during the session. It was engaging, interactive and insightful! I would highly recommend Mark and the Agile Pain Relief company for anyone looking to do their CSM training and pass the exam!
Valerie GVirtual
Instructor was very well connected with the teams. Immense knowledge on Agile and Scrum.
Deepa MOttawa
Mark was excellent! He is a very efficient communicator. Concise in the material he presents. The pace was great. I love the fact that scrum fundamentals were demonstrable.
Omesh MToronto
Honestly, the course was way better than expected and worked virtually. I was really nervous about how this would work. Enjoyed the course. It could almost be another 1/2 day in length. The instructor is very knowledgeable. I was a bit worried about the 'virtual' format, but it was so well designed that it worked so well. Kudos! The prep work is important to do - glad it's a requirement.
Dwight MVirtual
Amazing instructor! Makes you feel like he knows from ages! Very interactive class.
Kaushik KVirtual
Two thumb up! = Great, very worthy for the money I paid.
Juan Manuel GOttawa
Well organized, skillfully motivates the team and demonstrates excellent practical examples
Hanna MVirtual
Thank you. It has been one of the most interesting courses I have attended.
Hemant KToronto
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
Instructor was fantastic! Course content had some humour!
Joelle LPrivate Client
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
Mark is fun and engaging and has a great way of importing information in a memorable way.
Brittany LOttawa
Enjoyed and learned much more than expected out of a two day course.
Ian MOttawa
Excellent course! Not a wasted minute!
John MOttawa
The CSM course was extremely valuable in understanding the theorotical and practical concepts and techniques necessary to start my journey as Scrum Master. Mark was a knowledgeable and flexible facilitor.
Erik GToronto
I participated in the Certified Scrum Master course instructed by Mark Levison. Mark is a very well educated in the Agile Scrum methodology and presented the course material in a very entertaining way during the 2-day course. I learned a lot of things I had not previously known even though I had been practicing scrum for the past 5 years. I would highly recommend that every organization send their scrum focal’s to this training – it will help them advance their organization in implementing, and delivering scrum based projects, thus help their business be more successful.
Graham FVirtual
Great course and great instructor! Will definitely recommend to friends!
Hisham EOttawa
Excellent. Loved the real world experience brought to the course.
Jason MOttawa
Mark was fantastic and the course was a great!
Henry MVirtual
Mark is an awesome instructor! The course was very valuable and useful.
Chandni LToronto
Great course! I will recommend this to others.
Darryl EVancouver
Great facilitator. Kept interest with activities and exercises.
Lynn MOttawa
Concepts I learned in this course are more sticky because they were demonstrated through exercise and not just explained.
Joseph MOttawa
Nothing but positive things to say. Mark was very clear in the material he presented and was able to easily pivot to a new topic or give additional context as required. I enjoyed the exercises and open discussions.
Angela MOttawa
Great facilitator. Challenged my thinking. Very absorbing discussion. Very engaging considering it can be a very dry topic, as evidenced by the webinars I've listened to.
Aimee LToronto
Very informative and fun learning session.
Kim KPrivate Client
To the point and with passion!
Colin MToronto
The course was highly insightful. I feel more prepared to take on a Product Owner role. The instructor delivered it in a very easy to understand, digestable way. Making it fun and interactive and educational.
Mhairy MToronto
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
Mark is knowledgable and engaging. What I liked the most was that he stood his ground if anyone challenged what he taught (respectfully) and offered an explanation why.
Andrea MOttawa
It was a very helpful course and it met my expectations.
Vinicious GVancouver
Despite these unprecedented times, this course was great! Using tools like mural made this course engaging, fun and inspiring while being from home. Mark was up for answering all questions and challenging us, or at the very least pointing us in the right direction!
Jessica LVirtual
It was fantastic. I wasn't sure what to expect given my non-technical background but Mark was an amazing facilitor.
Kristin MKitchener-Waterloo
Awesome instructor, great course.
Kristie KPrivate Client
Very informed, prepared, punctual, and entertaining instructor. Took time to answer all questions, fully and with examples. Took lunch time to discuss specific questons. Course was structured well, with plenty of exercises and additional reading.
Hary MToronto
Mark Levison was an excellent instructor: knowledgeable, personable, and very approachable. The course material was clear and I felt like the coverage was appropriate.
Ken MMontreal

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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