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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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
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
Fantastic 2 days. Loved the incorporation of practical exercies. Lots of feedback and helps you understand how people think.
Tony KVancouver
I was impressed. The most valuable thing was not the principles (already knew most intellectually) but the instructor's zen master answers to challnges/questions. This aided in more intutive knowledge.
David AEdmonton
Awesome instructor with a sense of humor. Well read and fun!
Wendy AVancouver
Mark was good - foundatian of knowledge and his experiences made for good practical examples.
Mike AMontreal
Came in with a cynical view and attitude and left with nuggets of insight. That is quite an accomplishment for any instructor!
Mojtaba HOttawa
Very informative and interesting introduction to the concepts and principles of Agile development and Scrum.
Michael HVancouver
Mark is very insightful, knowledgable, and humourous. The topic was well covered and a delight to engage with. Great balance of peer interactions and instructor led discussions.
Peter HOttawa
I absolutely love your practical pragmatic approach to delivering information. Very conductive to learning.
Mandy JOttawa
Did a great job getting the information across. Provided real-world examples and concrete solutions that were helpful. Q&A throughout added a lot.
Jacob DPrivate Client
Great course that makes you think.
Seok Woo JToronto
Great course. I was unfamiliar with the role of scrum master apart from what I had read. This course gave me a great introduction and appreciation of what a good scrummaster can accomplish. The challenge now would be to implement it in my organization. Many tips were provided for this too so I am very optimistic.
Shabira JEdmonton
Fun and focused. Mark knows Scrum inside and out.
Ryan JEdmonton
Really liked the approach by Mark to apply Scrum methodology to this training. Also Mark was available to answer questions and patient.
Damien JOttawa
The course was really interactive, Mark did a great job at running the course online during the pandemic. He was always willing to answer questions and provide relevant resources. I like that the focus during class-time was more on effective implementation in the real world rather than learning text-book material.
Agata BVirtual
Very good experience, learned a lot, will be able to apply what I have learned, good job.
David KEdmonton
Mark was engaging and patient. He got everyone involved and kept spirits and energy levels high.
David BPrivate Client
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
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
Mark is great, crams a boat load into two days effectively.
Gordon IVirtual
Great instructor with clever communication techniques to help the attendees grasp ideas.
Asad BKitchener-Waterloo
Mark Levison's CSM workshop was one of the best on-line courses I have taken. Using a variety of on-line tools, we explored Scrum both on a broad surface level, then with deep dives into particular areas as voted for by the class. Mark made sure that everyone was satisfied with their own personal understanding before closing a particular topic. I had several areas that I wanted to focus on, and in each case they were answered to my satisfaction. Thank you Mark! I am very excited to take Scrum to my organization and create a high performance team!
Ross HVirtual
Good balance between questions at large and required materials. Very willing to work towards people's requests/expectations.
Brian HOttawa
Mark rocks! His extensive real world experience combined with his depth of knowledge of Scrum processes and tools made for a superior learning opportunity with lots of fun along the way. Highly recommend!
Steven CPrivate Client
Mark was great !! Very thorough - his passion for what he does came through. I appreciated his organization and engagement with the team. He was awesome.
Rene EVirtual
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
Passionate and enthusiastic instructor, excellent course and materials.
Don CVancouver
Very knowledgeable instructor. His experience is obvious.
Mark LMontreal
Fantastic. Very engaging and helpful blend of both Scrum and general business advice.
Dace DOttawa
Awesome and quirky.
Mamuna SToronto
Having been a scrummaster for a while, I was looking to get a refresher - but I got a whole discovery out of it.
Philippe LMontreal
Mark was knowledgable and provided us with a good base to start with.
Maria Noah MPrivate Client
The instructor is clearly knowledgeable about scrum and other approaches. The course demonstrates the basics of scrum very well.
Matthew BToronto
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
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
Mark was a patient and enthusiastic teacher, with knowledge spanning multiple industries. The course itself was a great mix of learning with lots of opportunities to do hands-on activities to really cement understanding. At the end of the course I felt confident in my understanding and my ability to pass the certification test. Thank you, Mark
Carrie BVirtual
Instructor was very well connected with the teams. Immense knowledge on Agile and Scrum.
Deepa MOttawa
Overall very well structured course. It helped me see the benefits of Scrum and learned how to apply it.
Nazir EOttawa
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
Mark is terrific at carrying a dialog on agile and his humor and humility make the class fun.
David MVirtual
Excellent communicator and educator who encourages students to think through questions. Thorough course material to get student "Ready to Rock"
Sue LToronto
Content and pace of course was good. Mark was a great coach and answered questions thoroughly.
Chris RKitchener-Waterloo
Very good two days with excellent discussions. Mark was very adept at provoking these discussions.
Richard MOttawa
Very knowledgeable and great communication skills to explain complex concepts in simple ways.
Ricard MToronto
It was a pleasure learning with Mark. The scrum-like structure of the course made it interactive and fun.
Florent GToronto
(Instructor was) very pragmatic and opened your mind and steer conversation, so you can figure it out, instead of reading through material.
Priya PPrivate Client
Great content, stories, anecdotes. Enjoyed instructor's enthusiasm and knowledge on the subject.
Paul JMontreal
I found Mark to be engaged, upbeat, and very knowledgeable.
Peter LPrivate Client
Awesome work on walking us through the process.
Steven CVancouver

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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