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. Good pace at class.
Denis TOttawa
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 is an awesome instructor! The course was very valuable and useful.
Chandni LToronto
The instructor demonstrates solid knowledge on Agile and scrum fundamentals. The course is interesting and easy to follow.
Don LEdmonton
Very engaging, interactive and lively CSPO virtual workshop. Mark is an excellent instructor and provided a lot of real world examples to help with understanding. Thank you for coaching. I will definitely recommend this course.
Cindy LVirtual
Awesome instructor and course! Will recommend!
Mikael GOttawa
I enjoyed the course and the instruction. Good examples were provided. Excercises helped me understand concepts.
Claire LPrivate Client
Engaged every minute of the course.
Eugene LMontreal
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
Mark Levison is an outstanding instructor who knows how to effectively deliver course content tailored to the learning needs of this students. Everyone on the course benefited greatly from his ability to present new information in a clear and easily understood manner. The Agile Foundations course provided an excellent overview of the Agile Methodology and SCRUM.
Michael GVirtual
Mark is very knowledgable. I really enjoy his style of teaching. Very good course.
Lionel GPrivate Client
Interesting personality and presentation style. Instructor's views align well with my own -> don't continue doing 'insane' things
Brad LEdmonton
This was a fantastic, informative course! I'm ready to try a few of the retro "games" with the team next week.
Erin GOttawa
Very knowledgeable in what he is teaching. Passion for scrum.
Mandi AEdmonton
I truly enjoyed the Scrum Master course. Mark shares industry knowledge so it is not just theory. The material/boards were easy to understand.
Yuri AVirtual
Training was excellent with good interaction. Knowledge sharing is good. Course was practically and informative. Mark Levison is enthusiastic with English subtle sense of humour and really aware of what he is explaining. The course helped to build confidence, valuable experiences and learning.
Yana KVirtual
Made me THINK!!! Provided Framework
Mike CPrivate Client
Great course! Very engaging and knowlegeable instructor.
Kolin BOttawa
Insightful material, engaging classroom practice.
Eliza BVirtual
Excellent! A refreshing approach! I loved the style of delivering the material and the many discussions and short exercises.
Mark APrivate Client
Great class. Great instructor! I will recommend!
Kim KMontreal
Mark was recommended to me from a colleague and I honestly was delighted of how much I learned from the course. I have been as a project manager for a number of years, and I really felt that I was able to understand how to apply this to my current work and also even how to work within my working style.
Joyce KVirtual
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
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
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
It was a very helpful course and it met my expectations.
Vinicious GVancouver
Instructor is super knowledgeable and shared his wealth of expertise in a meaning manner.
Randy GPrivate Client
Overall excellent instruction to Agile, practical exercises worked well, foundation to applications of principles and desire to learn more established.
Stuart BVancouver
A fantastic approach to teaching Scrum and agile practices.
Jordan LToronto
Great instruction and high levels of interaction made for an enjoyable course. I gained a greater appreciation for the ScrumMaster role and the game of Scrum!
Kevin BToronto
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 incredibly knowledge and experienced and it's very apparent. I learned more than I could have expected. I greatly appreciate all the additional reading materials. I would have never been able to collect such a library on my own and I have a fascination for good leadership and developing high performing teams.
Anly HOttawa
He is very engaging and clear. It was easy to grasp the concepts and apply it to exercises.
Jamielyn CToronto
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
The instructor is clearly knowledgeable about scrum and other approaches. The course demonstrates the basics of scrum very well.
Matthew BToronto
Mark was a great commincator of the concepts. He practiced what he preached by using SCRUM to team.
Darren MMontreal
He explained extremely well and gave great concrete examples. Helped to see how to apply to work place.
Genevieve CMontreal
Mark is extremely academically knowledgeable in this space. This knowledge mixed with his real world experience and ability to engage a group makes his class a delightful experience.
Melissa MPrivate Client
Mark was excellent and lots of knowledge and passion about Scrum. His anecdotal stories were entertaining and informational.
Kevin MPrivate Client
Mark and the course were able to give me a lot of different perspectives on how scrum can be applied. Mark is very knowledgable and has tech background [which] helped myself as we knew the sector better.
Nicholas LOttawa
Instructor is very knowledgeable, approachable and fun which aids learning.
Kevin MOttawa
Really enjoyed the course. Mark has a unique way of explaining concepts that have a very positive effect on the learning process.
Daniel LMontreal
Very knowledgeable, informative, flexible in fitting situations into ideas.
Katie MOttawa
Very smart and knowledgeable about not only Scrum but also Agile practices. Didn't mince words and instilled confidence in us that we could make his advice work for us.
Simon LOttawa
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
Very knowledgeable instructor. His experience is obvious.
Mark LMontreal
Mark was excellent! He is a very efficient communicator. Concise in the material he presents. The pace was great. I love the fact that scrum fundamentals were demonstrable.
Omesh MToronto
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
The instructor was very knowledgeable and kept me interested in the content by applying real life scenarios.
Jennifer MPrivate Client
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

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 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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