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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Great instructor, light atmosphere, very knowledgeable and engaging. Thank You!
Edwine JVirtual
Great workshop by Mark. Level of engagement to collaboration were awesome!
Jason QEdmonton
Mark Levison lives and embodies the SCRUM in his courses. Never before have I felt so empowered to self-organize in a classroom setting.
Zoltan MOttawa
Awesome. Enlightment for pain points like overtime, too many WIP, motivation, etc.
Susie LVancouver
Mark is a great instructor that gave us a lot of examples. Generated collaboration.
Francois NMontreal
Very informative. Well presented. Good tempo.
Robert MOttawa
Mark is extremely knowledgeable and well-spoken. Course is well facilitated/structured overall.
Matthew TVancouver
Very knowledgeable and great communication skills to explain complex concepts in simple ways.
Ricard MToronto
Great course Mark! I really enjoyed learning more about the framwork and listening to others point of view.
Sarah MToronto
Fantastic overview of everything PO, Agile, Scrum. Learning how to manage and maintain a collaborative product backlog will be so valuable.
Elizabeth MPrivate Client
Excellent course! Was able to relate to everything covered. Scrum should be used every day.
Mark MEdmonton
Awesome and objective! Careful not to influence how we work by answering other students.
Shawn MMontreal
Excellent instructor providing clear explanations. The course structure is flawless.
Benoit NMontreal
I enjoyed having Mark as an instructor, he is knowledgeable on the topic, provided easy to follow examples, and has a good sense of humour. I liked how he took notes on questions people had, provided a brief answer and then provided links after the workshop so that we could follow up on the topics that interest us. The 10 min sanity breaks that he gave every hour were great as it allowed my brain to relax and then come back and focus. I really enjoyed the course, I learned lots over the 2 day workshop. I feel like 2 days might be a bit short for the course as I would have enjoyed another day of the course to learn more and refine my skills. I would recommend this course to anyone new to the scrum master role or interested in learning about scrum as it gives you a great base that you can expand.
Christopher MVirtual
Well organized, skillfully motivates the team and demonstrates excellent practical examples
Hanna MVirtual
Excellent. Well worth money and time.
David MOttawa
Mark's knowledge and real world examples have cleared up my knowledge of scrum, the roles and responsibilities of the scrum team, and what I need to implement in my organization.
Greg MEdmonton
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
Great background experience, a lot of passion in his speech, was able to answer even challenging questions.
Alex NPrivate Client
Great! Very enthuiastic instructor and made learning a breeze.
Dalbir SKitchener-Waterloo
Great job!
Rana ROttawa
It is very well organized and timed. The teacher has a really deep, hands-on knowledge about the subject.
Alberto MPrivate Client
Knowledgeable, prepared, interactive.
Anca MMontreal
The material/presentation were top notch. Demontrations/examples were very good. Instructor is enthusiastic, knowledgeable.
Norm RKitchener-Waterloo
This course was an essential intro for me, a noob in Scrum. I was guided through material I need to know, while at the same time allowed to explore concepts on my own.
Vanessa MToronto
Mark's methods are very engaging. It allows to learn by collaboration and "Telling Back".
Prateek SVancouver
Mark is an excellent facilitator and he has amazing expertise.
Rory SToronto
Great speaker, insightful, willing to be "Frank" - no pun intended.
Paul SPrivate Client
The instructor is very knowledgeable in the subject and kept us motivated and alert during the course. The course itself covers lots of material which is necessary for someone who wants to become a successful scrum master.
Elena RVirtual
Well presented - effective - open to discussion - provides information that shows us better methods and resources for self learning.
Bedros NMontreal
Instructor was very entertaining and knowledgeable. I believe the course was well aligned to the scrum methodology. Very clever.
Ravi SEdmonton
It was such a pleasure to meet Mark and hve him be our instructor for 2 days. He has really good method to run this course and deliver the message. Also, his humour is 5*!
Neesa RVirtual
Very effective and experienced instructor. Well organized.
Sam MOttawa
Mark's teaching methods make the course fly and help the information stick. He gives a clear understanding of the theory of agile/scrum and real world application tips so students can apply scrum immediately and successfully.
Anne MOttawa
Mark is excellent. He instructs and communicates in simple and visual ways that are memorable. He is adaptable, and does a great job balancing needs of individuals and the group.
Ryan MToronto
Very knowledgeable and well-versed in the art and science of Scrum and Agile. Clearly has a breadth of experience to share.
Sara MVirtual
This is my third course with Mark. I enjoy his courses and his humor. He really knows how to connect with the group. He is a wealth of knowledge related to agile and scrum and he provies a lot of great advice on how to solve our problems at work.
Shelley COttawa
The teach went further to clarify question and add valuable information from other Agile methodology.
Marco SMontreal
Mark did an excellent job. I appreciated the hands-on nature of the training wherein we actually tried to do Scrum. He was patient handling all our questions and issues, and managed to keep us engaged despite being on Zoom.
Dan MVirtual
Really helpful and inspiring!
Thomas (Tan) PToronto
Fun and focused. Mark knows Scrum inside and out.
Ryan JEdmonton
Mark is very well prepared and understands his material in depth. He has a very logical way of looking at questions which can shift people’s understanding in a useful way. If you need to understand “pure” Scrum, this is a good course.
Paul AVirtual
Excellent instructor and very knowledgeable. I feel much more prepared for a process that I am already a part of.
Shamir REdmonton
Content, Pace, Instructor: all 5/5 stars
LeAnne SOttawa
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
Great course - certainly lived up to its reputation.
Ryann MKitchener-Waterloo
Remarkable! Knowledgeable! Relatable! Mark's style was a style that I can relate to. I was engaged. Enjoyed the variety of explanations, sharing screens, working with my team mates. The overall structure and delivery of the training material exceeded my expectations.
Brenda DVirtual
Instructor was very well connected with the teams. Immense knowledge on Agile and Scrum.
Deepa MOttawa
Mark is very entertaining and knowledgable, the combination of which made for a great two days of training, well done!
Daniel JKitchener-Waterloo
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

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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