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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Instructor was great, would continue the engaging exercises and involving people in the room.
Hussein RToronto
Mark is a great instructor for a difficult topic. The course was great to establish Agile/Scrum basics.
Hansil SPrivate Client
Mark was great at adapting to our needs - how very agile!
Mika TPrivate Client
As a self-employed business owner with a small team, this course was helpful in understanding how to improve my company's value to clients.
Murtada SEdmonton
Very knowledgeable of the subject matter. Kept the pace of the course quick, which is good.
Tarek ROttawa
The simulations and exercises were extremely useful in the understanding of the concept. Mark made the course thoroughly enjoyable. Extremely pleased by the techniques used and the content of the course.
Dhaval SOttawa
Mark, thanks for an awesome class. I was quite impressed how you were able to run the entire course, without consulting notes or a PowerPoint! Then I noticed your Jedi mind trick of putting a finger to your temple to recall information… at least it seemed that way. I have nothing at all by way of improvement I can offer for you. The course was informative and your style was quite engaging
Thom RPrivate Client
Mark is one of the most interesting humans I’ve had the pleasure to meet. As a student, I can tell he genuinely has our interest and development in mind when creating and delivering his workshops. I can’t say enough good things about the practical knowledge I’ve gained taking this training.
Michael RVirtual
Awesome. Enlightment for pain points like overtime, too many WIP, motivation, etc.
Susie LVancouver
Excellent instructor. Left lots of room for us to think by ourselves. Great!
Kathleen LVancouver
Instructor was very invested in the material. Very knowledgeable and relatable.
Alan MEdmonton
He rocks! I like a lot of the tips given by him.
Fagner SMontreal
Very useful take on scrum, focused on the prod owners needs and responsibilities. Practical tools to start and plenty of other sources of info to continue growing.
Paula MToronto
Great course, a lot of valuable information. Experienced instructor, great ability to adapt to group and real work situtations.
Karen LPrivate Client
Mark is great trainer, and explained all the terms in a way for us to easy understand.
Cynthia SVirtual
To the point and with passion!
Colin MToronto
Mark is very knowledgeable and he was very patient in explaining the topics to us.
Mary Angeli MKitchener-Waterloo
Excellent instruction and examples on how to combine Scrum with the realities of a corporate enviroment.
Kevin SOttawa
Instructor was very entertaining and knowledgeable. I believe the course was well aligned to the scrum methodology. Very clever.
Ravi SEdmonton
Mark was absolutely good. He has a confidence that helps me know what is and is not part of scrum. He has a clarity about the concept of scrum. He allows session participants to see where they can be creative.
Kelly SVirtual
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
Patient and helpful in answering questions throughout the course. Appreciate the resources shared i.e. book recommendations to further learning outside of the course. I liked how Mark encouraged small gains instead of trying to implement an overnight solution
Katherine SVirtual
Well done, Mark. We laughed a lot and you made this real for us.
Joshua SKitchener-Waterloo
Mark is exceptionally knowledgeable and offered many useful tibits I can better my organization with.
James ROttawa
Really appreciate the efforts and ernest delivery.
Shauna REdmonton
Mark is very knowledgeable and communicates the value of Scrum very clearly. He uses real-world examples which helps tremendously.
Matt MOttawa
Great course. Mark clearly knows his stuff!
Marc LOttawa
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
Mark was fantastic. Possibly the best, most prepared instructor I've seen. He was awesome.
Colin MToronto
Instructor was well organized and touched each topic in a sequential matter that was logical.
Joe PMontreal
I like to recommend this course to other team members to help everyone get to the same mindset and understanding. I gained a clearer understanding of what Agile really is and I'd like to see it work in my future projects.
Lynda SEdmonton
Awsome course, Learned an amazing amout. Mark is fun and an interesting man. He made learning fun.
Donna REdmonton
I felt that Mark is an incredible teacher. He's extemely knowledgeable on the subject and shares his experience with the entire class. Very structured.
Anthony PToronto
Mark is quite knowledgable about the subject. A good collaborative style was used so I can learn everyone's views and share what I could gather.
Sriprasadh ROttawa
Great course! My future teams will be thankful to be a high performance team.
Filipe PVancouver
Very informative course on the use of Scrum for software development. It covers all the areas of scrum, including all the key players and demonstrates how the roles, responsibilities and process work together to create effective, self organizing teams.
Amera PEdmonton
Brilliantly said. I am happy to be part of this Scrum Product owner course.
Esva PMontreal
Very knowledgeable instructor that kept the course interesting. Course material was awesome! I will recommend to others.
Dave PToronto
Great job, Mark. Great overall devliery. Kept the content interesting.
Parv SToronto
Very informative. Well presented. Good tempo.
Robert MOttawa
Excellent instructor providing clear explanations. The course structure is flawless.
Benoit NMontreal
Mark is Great! I took a CSM course from him 11 years ago, hence I picked this course again 11 years later.
Justin LVirtual
Mark is very knowledgable. He provided interesting background on errors/mistakes committed by Scrum teams.
Prabh SToronto
He is a great listener, well spoken and gives great examples and explanations. Speaks slowly, makes sure everyone understands.
Maxime MMontreal
A +
Derek SOttawa
Excellent course, although packed! Good pace.
Catherine SVancouver
Very Charming, approachable, easy to ask questions to.
Carly SToronto
Mark was great explaining the concepts of Scrum. Practical solutions with testing and QA Implementation.
Ramya RKitchener-Waterloo
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
Awesome. I got more than enough info to get me started and max team productivity.
Joel RVancouver

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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