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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I feel like the structure of the course is good in how it is treated as a backlog with all the participants prioritizing topics.
Aaron GOttawa
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
Calm, knowledgeable, and open to questions. Great.
Brandon GVirtual
Great course that makes you think.
Seok Woo JToronto
Excellent course, gained a lot of context on SCRUM best practices beyond the context of how [Private Client] currently operates.
Hamza EPrivate Client
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 well presented to the needs of the students. Adapts to the questions and situations very well. Like real life examples encouraged discussion.
Hoyt LPrivate Client
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
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
The instructor was well prepared, and extremely knowledgeable. The course was structured in a way that it was easy to follow, well structured, and easy to be engaged. All the team activities were extremely useful to put in practice the theory. I enjoyed every single one! Virtual learning is a really difficult environment, and the instructor made it look like a piece of cake, kept us engaged throughout the days. Kuddos!
Jenny CVirtual
Came in with a cynical view and attitude and left with nuggets of insight. That is quite an accomplishment for any instructor!
Mojtaba HOttawa
The CSM course rocks! If you want to immediately jump into the action and improve as you go, this is it. You'll start off as a group of strangers, and find out how quickly you can build a high-performance team. And, if you separately want to read every comprehensive detail there is to know about scrum, Mark will share that with you too.
Nicole BVirtual
Course was fantastic and informative. The instructor did his best to include as much of the expensive material as he could. It was engaging and fun to listen to. I would highly recomment this training to anyone interested in the Scrum methology.
Derrick BOttawa
Running the course as a Scrum project and including a real Scrum exchange really reinforced the material.
David COttawa
Mark was a great instructor. He made things really fun and engaging. It wasn't just a boring lecture to sit through for two days. It kept us engaged and we learned a lot. Thanks Mark!
Geeta BVirtual
Awesome instructor with a sense of humor. Well read and fun!
Wendy AVancouver
Excellent communicator, good at focusing on the important topics.
Mick BPrivate Client
Overall excellent instruction to Agile, practical exercises worked well, foundation to applications of principles and desire to learn more established.
Stuart BVancouver
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
Excellent overview of Scrum/Kanban/Agile. The technical material/theoretical material was well balanced/augments with the personal expeirences of the instructor. Highly recommend.
Dino CPrivate Client
Mark is a patient and very organized coach. I appreciate the ability to get through so much information in only 2 days. Mark really focuses on what one needs to have a better understand of scrum and it's benefits.
Brian AVirtual
Course was informative and entertaining. There was good participant involvement and useful examples.
George COttawa
Classes with Mark was so worthwhile! Mark has an amazing way of breaking things down so that they are understandable, and always keeping it light and fun. Overall, the course is well designed, and the topics were engaging and useful.
Mohamad AVirtual
Mark is a great presenter. I appreciate that he is to the point and succinct in his points, but can expand when prompted. I appreciate that there was room for "derailment" and that the training was made more custom tailored to the individual experiences of the scrum masters at our org. The subject matter was good. I think it contained a lot of the info that new scrum masters don't think about, and covered a lot of traps that they fall into.
Adel AVirtual
This is the first course that I have taken virtually, and I enjoyed it very much. Thanks to Mark!
Jennifer HVirtual
Mark was great at teaching the class. He really knows the course and it is obvious Scrum is second nature to him. Real life experience (in class exercises) are key to learning Scrum.
Cara CToronto
Great instructor, very satisfied, will recomment! I brought my whole team with me, happy I did.
Joshua COttawa
This course is valuable to anyone who would like to be introduced to Scrum. It was a well spended 2 day course and was very helpful. Mark is very knowledgeable and a very good coach.
Ronald HOttawa
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
Instructor was great, very knowledgeable and open to questions. The course opened my eyes to scrum mechanics. I now understand what scrummaster in the team was attempting to do.
Sharon JEdmonton
I really liked that although we did a paper website exercise we used it as a tool for conversation and there wasn't pressure to complete and present it to the group.
Angela GToronto
I will highly recommend Mark. I enjoyed the course.
Shamyl NVancouver
Mark has been a great facilitator, instructor, and extremely knowledgeable on teaching Scrum. Great analogies and references cited.
Wilfred MPrivate Client
Awsome course, Learned an amazing amout. Mark is fun and an interesting man. He made learning fun.
Donna REdmonton
Whether you have 0 days or 10 years of product owner experience you're guaranted to learn a lot from this course.
Luke NOttawa
Excellent communicator and educator who encourages students to think through questions. Thorough course material to get student "Ready to Rock"
Sue LToronto
Instructor was very engaging, but also shared valuable insight that will help me succeed.
Morgan TPrivate Client
Mark delivered an excellent course, it was a value-packed 2 days.
Brent COttawa
Very concise, clear material. Lots of experience went into the material and live explanation.
Justin LKitchener-Waterloo
Great course, awesome instructor!
Paul-Andre PPrivate Client
Mark is an amazing instructor-- knowledgeable, professional, but also humorous and fun. This is not one of those cookie-cutter courses, because Mark tailors the discussions to the needs of his students. It is suitable for someone new to Scrum, but also others with Scrum experience who would like to get more in-depth.
Sandy LVirtual
Mark delivered the course exceptionally well.
Amjad GEdmonton
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
A wealth of useful and interesting knowledge.
Sarah HEdmonton
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
Very knowledgeable and experienced, thanks!
Kendall OVancouver
Brilliant approach to coaching.
Serguei LToronto
Mark did a great job of purposefully making us all feel included and engaged with his class. He added great clarity to the budding scrum process that has taken over in my workplace. I have seen many versions and perspectives on scrum values that deviate and distort how scrum would work, but I am now confident I can facilitate with my projects and team, using a much clearer scrum.
Charlene FVirtual
I love this course. It was incredibly helpful and throught provoking. I enjoyed the teach style and directness of the instructor.
Victoria MEdmonton
Mark was an excellent instructor and facilitator for the certified product owner course. The content was engaging, not just a typical PowerPoint presentation. Active learning was encouraged through the use of breakout sessions where the course material was practiced; this allowed for better understanding and encouraged practical questions. I would recommend the course to anybody that wants to improve their product ownership skills and has the means to attend.
Mark FVirtual

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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Use Scrum knowledge to standout at work, get paid more, and impress your customer, all without burning out.

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