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 knowledgeable instructor, great info on theory and practice. Lots more info to cover if we had more time.
Jamie GOttawa
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
Overall awesome. I am really inspired & revigorated to do this with my team.
Mikaela GVancouver
Mark is very entertaining and knowledgable, the combination of which made for a great two days of training, well done!
Daniel JKitchener-Waterloo
I found Mark very engaging and thought he helped make the material very interesting.
Jason DToronto
Very knowledgeable instructor about scrum and software development in general.
Elizabeth GOttawa
Great course material and energetic instructor.
Chris HPrivate Client
Came in with a cynical view and attitude and left with nuggets of insight. That is quite an accomplishment for any instructor!
Mojtaba HOttawa
Instructor is engaging; good change of state during delivery. I like the more concrete demonstration of SCRUM by teaching the course in the SCRUM style.
Damon HEdmonton
Thank you. It has been one of the most interesting courses I have attended.
Hemant KToronto
Excellent reinforcements of concepts and techniques on Agile-related challenges. Mark delivered the course at an excellent pace. I thoroughly enjoyed the session as he kept the team engaged wih useful examples and in-depth topic knowledge. Great reinforcement of Agile concepts.
Seeha GPrivate Client
Awesome instructor and course! Will recommend!
Mikael GOttawa
The course was very interesting and provided enough for me to start structuring my team's work along scrum principles.
Eric DPrivate Client
Wanted to say thanks again for the great insights at the CSM course last month. I've had a fair amount of success thus far introducing and implementing the concepts at the agency I work for. We completed our first full Scrum project yesterday. Scrum really is a magnifying glass for issues. We identified quite a few with our systems within the first couple of days and are now radically overhauling how we assign budgets to projects.
Paul AOttawa
Having come with a very limited knowledge of Scrum, Mark did a great job of leading the class through the knowledge required. The material was engaging and there were great opportunities to work with other learners as a team to practice different elements of the knowledge. Mark is friendly and humorous which made the otherwise very intense schedule a fun experience. He consistently offered great suggestions of further reading to consider in order to better understand the many elements of this practice.
Michael HVirtual
Instructor was very passionate about subject and links theory to concrete examples.
Jean-Philippe BMontreal
Very knowledgeable, led the session very well.
Bob BPrivate Client
Mark was very personable and knowledgeable about the subject. Nothing threw him.
Sharon GPrivate Client
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
Running the course as a Scrum project and including a real Scrum exchange really reinforced the material.
David COttawa
Awesome speaker. Fantastic course.
Helen KMontreal
There is so much about Scrum that I didn't know I didn't know! Thanks Mark for an informative and engaging 2 days.
Dan LKitchener-Waterloo
I liked him. I did Scrum Master certification with him a long time ago and, when my colleague and I thought about doing PO training, I suggested we searched to see if he was still active. We feel his experience when he talks.
Christian DVirtual
Very patient. Really liked the group activity where we had to work in Sprints on user stories.
Anita AVirtual
Great course! I will recommend this to others.
Darryl EVancouver
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
This instructor was absolutely brilliant. He was very clear and knowlegable in all the areas. He was also very honest in his opinions.
Jonathan EOttawa
Mark was very energetic and enthusiastic instructor. You could definitely feel his passion for Agile and Engineering as a whole.
William IPrivate Client
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
Instructor was engaged, interesting, and fun. He included all members in discussion and Q/A. The course provided me with what I need to start effectively using scrum at work.
Erik CEdmonton
Awesome work on walking us through the process.
Steven CVancouver
Mark's briiliant, I would like an assessment on our company and some hints.
Stefano GToronto
Mark did an excellent job keeping the course dynamic and informative. I would have loved a few more days to really dig into some subjects.
Tim KPrivate Client
Loved this course! Mark is very thorough and attentive as a teacher. He leveraged Mural in such interactive ways, which allowed him to understand the students well and shape the class accordingly. He is like the Jedi master of scrum and insanely advanced methods of leaderless collaboration and accomplishment. He's also the king of super nerdy jokes, which made the class fun and brought out the super nerd in everyone.
Lia GVirtual
Mark was very personable, easy going and knows what he was teaching. This makes the class environment more interactive and fun
Dan DVirtual
Had little to no knowledge/training of Scrum & Agile and this was a great intro, with a couple of deep(er) dives. This course definitely helped me get introduced to Scrum and the world of Agile. While it's nice that scrum doesn't explicitly tell you how to do something, it definitely requires a significant amount of application in the real world to learn it.
Daneila DToronto
Great use of time. Very clear examples of work life situations.
Duane BToronto
This has been the most useful training course I have taken. Even though we have been practicing "Scrum" for years there was no useless content.
Simon HOttawa
Excellent course content delivered in a direct, practical and memorable fashion.
Kimberley KOttawa
Instructor was informative and handled the challenges he faced well.
Ruth JPrivate Client
Extremely knowledgable on all material covered. Tons of experience and real world examples to pull from. Knowledgable on all material covered as well as periphery topics. Funny, engaging, and helped class feel they added value.
Steve DKitchener-Waterloo
Mark was fantastic. He really knows how to keep everyone engaged and I found the course really fun. Still subscribe to the belief that learning is done best when you're having fun so thank you :)
Sabrina AVirtual
Passionate, Articulate, Well organized, and knowledgeable. Highly recommended
Nick KVancouver
Mark did an excellent job of teaching the material and went beyond just presenting it.
Noah AEdmonton
Interesting, engaging, practical exercises.
Olga HMontreal
I had made one course already (Scrum Master) a couple of years back, and again Mark did not disappoint, good empathy, great presence and vibrant (even through virtual activities) always appreciate the good vibes. Content is serious but Mark knows how to go beyond simply handing out his knowledge, he makes it an experience.
Romain HVirtual
Mark is an extremely knowledgeable Scrum practitioner and a great coach! He gave each of the participants clear and useful answers to the questions we had during the training, whether the questions were about the material or from work experiences, and helped us figure out how to handle situations on our own. This is the first time I take an agile training that gives me clarity about ways of improving how I work with my team
Martha BVirtual
This course was fun and informative. The instructor was a great motivator/animator of the material. I really appreciated the efforts in engaging the audience.
Bill LMontreal
The instructor was very enthusiastic and knowledgeable on Agile. His teaching methods were very clever and humble, I feel that all the course attendees found him experienced and clever.
Jamin IToronto
Interesting personality and presentation style. Instructor's views align well with my own -> don't continue doing 'insane' things
Brad LEdmonton

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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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.

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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.

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