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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Thank you for this course, I don’t recall ever having such a good teacher during my studies! I am very satisfied and I can’t wait to start and try to improve things. I will say to my colleagues that are being formed to be PO that they should have looked to your classes.
Laurene TVirtual
Very good and useful information. I like the format (no boring Powerpoint) and doing the meeting as a sprint was great.
Fred BPrivate Client
Provided excellent understanding of scrum, more difficult concepts with a very hands on approach.
Carmen CToronto
Mark is a very entertaining instructor. I feel I learned a great deal more than I could through reading/self study.
Michael HToronto
Great course to get started. Mark is greatly knowledgeable and shares well the information.
Christine AMontreal
Lots of information and data for a great walk through about the agile methodology.
Pierre-Michel AMontreal
This was the first professional class I've taken that gave me a more in depth perspective of the scrum process. Really concise in explanations. Stays on topic as best as possible. Extremely helpful.
Michelle KToronto
Course was great. Mark was terrific! Kept us involved and thinking.
Anne DPrivate Client
Fantastic instructor. Great real story examples.
Allan CEdmonton
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 made the class enjoyable. I was initially dreading a 3 day course. After the first day I knew that I could live through the course.
Dickie BPrivate Client
The ScrumMaster training as facilitated by Mark Levison was an invaluable experience in my both by personal and professional growth. Mark's instruction kept me engaged and entertained with materials for the duration of the 2 day seminar. I will highly recommend this course to anyone interested in exploring Agile within their places of work.
Mike EVirtual
Great instructor, light atmosphere, very knowledgeable and engaging. Thank You!
Edwine JVirtual
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
Great course. Information overload but not in a bad way. I liked that we discussed specific corporate problems people were having. Helped build context in how others are using Agile/Scrum. Maybe misusing, too.
Tyler BVancouver
Mark is an excellent instructor with lots of experience-based knowledge. He goes beyond teaching the basics by applying, and letting us apply, the knowledge to real world example.
Ettore CMontreal
Excellent material, entertaining instructor. Instructor distilled the information well. Both instructor and course provided a great intro to Scrum. The course was challenging yet rewarding.
Duff KOttawa
Mark clearly presents the scrum process and principles. He provides background information and stories to reinforce these techniques.
Richard COttawa
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
Very interactive. Even though I was jet-lagged and sick, I enjoyed the class and did not fall asleep.
Negar HToronto
I had the best two days of practical training on Agile. Instructor has logical answers to my questions.
Angie EEdmonton
Mark was very entertaining, which made what I expected to be a boring two days very enjoyable, while still learning.
Zach BKitchener-Waterloo
Fantastic. Very engaging and helpful blend of both Scrum and general business advice.
Dace DOttawa
Mark knows his stuff. Great leader. Looking forward to reading his blog.
Brian RToronto
I liked the Powerpoint-less approach. It kept me more engaged and was less barrier in learning.
Geoff DKitchener-Waterloo
Very concise, clear material. Lots of experience went into the material and live explanation.
Justin LKitchener-Waterloo
Very passionate and organized, kept material interesting.
Sjoerd FEdmonton
Mark is very knowledgeable and is great at simplifying and illustrating abstract concepts.
Thierry LMontreal
Mark is extremely knowledgeable and passionate about the subject matter and topics adjacent to it. His attitude encourages engagement in the material.
Jamie CVirtual
Greatly impressed by the teaching style and format of the course. Much appreciate the sprint style format and the engagment level of the instructor.
Hatem NOttawa
Knows course material well. Quick to answer all questions.
Michael BEdmonton
Mark is great - knows the material and can address all questions, prompting us to try and answer them first! Great trainer, I would recommend him to others.
Frances AOttawa
Mark was very personable, easy going an know what he was teaching. This makes the class environment more interactive and fun.
Asif BVirtual
Very pleased to have taken this course. Learned lots of valuable information about Scrum and I want to start using in a short term. Mark is a great instructor. He was making us think so we really understand the Agile principles. Would recommend.
Line CVirtual
Mark was very well prepared with the material and handled questions well. You gave us enough information to address our own issues without giving us the solution.
Ramiz IPrivate Client
Very knowledgeable, informative, flexible in fitting situations into ideas.
Katie MOttawa
This was an excellent training. I really valued how engaging Mark was as a facilitator, everyone had the space to contribute and ask questions, and I loved how interactive and applicable it was, especially for myself outside of the software industry. It was incredibly fun and I learned a lot - I feel ready to step into a Scrum Master role and am excited at how it can improve the value we offer to clients at my organization.
Sarah HVirtual
Great course - certainly lived up to its reputation.
Ryann MKitchener-Waterloo
Really helpful and inspiring!
Thomas (Tan) PToronto
Was very fun and good flow, not by the book provided but with sharing real-life examples and his previous experience. Very appreciated!
Kevin LToronto
Mark is obviously very invested in the material. I never doubted that he was an expert with a lot of industry experience.
Devin ROttawa
Mark knows the subject very well. He was never boring. He has offered good references for us to continue studying on our own.
Melanie LPrivate Client
Mark knows this content, kept us engaged and provided hands-on workshop tasks to understand the conent. Fantastic approach to this course with backlog and Sprints. Stories and answering questions of the group was appreciated.
Matt FPrivate Client
True value demonstrated outside of the software development world.
Theresa BToronto
Mark's session was a great combination of theory, practical exercises and real life stories that kept this learner engaged and involved. Time spent was definitely worthwhile. Thanks!
Justin LVirtual
Mark was very energetic and enthusiastic instructor. You could definitely feel his passion for Agile and Engineering as a whole.
William IPrivate Client
Well structured training. Excellent communication skills.
Khaled MToronto
The content of the course covered most of things I was looking for. Mark is a knowledgeable instructor and was able to answer all of the queries the class had.
Ramandeep MEdmonton
Excellent course! Was able to relate to everything covered. Scrum should be used every day.
Mark MEdmonton
Great course! I will recommend this to others.
Darryl EVancouver

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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