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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This is my second course with Mark and it was fantastic! Mark is incredibly knowledgeable and engaging. Taking the course virtually was very smooth. I was still able to connect with some great new people while learning a ton and having fun.
Robin DVirtual
Great! Very enthuiastic instructor and made learning a breeze.
Dalbir SKitchener-Waterloo
Awesome speaker. Fantastic course.
Helen KMontreal
5 Stars
Yui HEdmonton
Mark is a knowledgeable and fun person. He was able to clearly explain the concepts and facilitiate discussions and progress.
Teodor HPrivate Client
Great conversations. Thanks, Mark! My confidence in understanding the role increased!
Orville HEdmonton
Excellent. Would recommend any time.
Cindy IEdmonton
The instructor demonstrates solid knowledge on Agile and scrum fundamentals. The course is interesting and easy to follow.
Don LEdmonton
I enjoyed the course and the instruction. Good examples were provided. Excercises helped me understand concepts.
Claire LPrivate Client
Very good, very detailed.
John LMontreal
Fantastic 2 days. Loved the incorporation of practical exercies. Lots of feedback and helps you understand how people think.
Tony KVancouver
Mark is a great instructor, we can see the vast experience that he has from his training style. We have learnt as much as it is possible from a two day workshop. Keep up the good work Mark.
Sreepad KVirtual
Mark is amazing at asking thought-povoking questions to think on issues at a 2nd degree level. (i.e. reasons behind the challenge)
Connie LToronto
This course gave me a new insight into delivering better software for the customer more effectively.
Len CVancouver
Provided excellent understanding of scrum, more difficult concepts with a very hands on approach.
Carmen CToronto
Mark was engaging, knowledgeable, well-read and provided great examples.
Warren CVancouver
Fantastic. Very engaging and helpful blend of both Scrum and general business advice.
Dace DOttawa
Mark is a great teacher. Funny, communicates his ideas well, very knowledgeable, - a great teacher! This was a good course!
Anthony DVirtual
Despite these unprecedented times, this course was great! Using tools like mural made this course engaging, fun and inspiring while being from home. Mark was up for answering all questions and challenging us, or at the very least pointing us in the right direction!
Jessica LVirtual
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
Mark is very knowledgeable and his experience with Agile and Scrum was awesome as he was able to provide lots of tips and examples.
Sophie CVirtual
Mark is an excellent educator and guru of the world of agile and human behaviour. Topics introduced in this course were broken down into easy to understand concepts and how to possibly apply them to the real world. His viewpoints and solutions are educated and more importantly, help to encourage thought and self learning.
Vibol HVirtual
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
10/10 Loved the atmosphere he created, kept us engaged, able to send important messages, did not overwhelm us.
Biljana CPrivate Client
Very unique training style, really appreciate that I don’t have to look at power point screen. Appreciate the Q&As and the end of class recap round.
Vicky CPrivate Client
Great energy. Interesting course material.
Julie CToronto
Amazing course! Love every second of it. Mark kept us all engaged. I knew nothing about agile/scrum and now feel well equipped to make changes at work. I'd love for the rest of my team to attend.
Shravan COttawa
Mark was very energetic and enthusiastic instructor. You could definitely feel his passion for Agile and Engineering as a whole.
William IPrivate Client
Class was fun and instructive. Mark was a great help, understanding and pushed our creative thinking and problems solving abilities further. Thank you!
Caroline DMontreal
Mark is engaging, very knowledgeable and morphs to the class knowledge. His sense of humor is also appreciated.
Malisha CToronto
Mark delivered an excellent course, it was a value-packed 2 days.
Brent COttawa
Great energy. Made the day pass with a mix of humour and data.
Matthew COttawa
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
Running the course as a Scrum project and including a real Scrum exchange really reinforced the material.
David COttawa
Mark, you were an absolute pleasure! Thank you for a well thoughtout and enjoyable course. I've learned a lot of great tips I plan to start using immediately.
Monica CToronto
Mark leads the class on an explanation of the topics and provides traps to ensure students can learn from practice.
Peter CPrivate Client
Very knowledgeable instructor. His experience is obvious.
Mark LMontreal
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
The course was very interesting and provided enough for me to start structuring my team's work along scrum principles.
Eric DPrivate Client
Mark did an excellent job instructing, keeping the team focused and engaged. I really enjoyed the two days.
Mike SKitchener-Waterloo
Great course! Mark is entertaining and knowledgable. Bring your questions and touch problems. Exploring participants' real-world problems triggered the best, most useful discussions in the course.
Jessica SOttawa
Mark is very knowledgeable and communicates the value of Scrum very clearly. He uses real-world examples which helps tremendously.
Matt MOttawa
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 was great and full of recommendations. He was also very knowledgeable and able to answer all our questions.
Chris MPrivate Client
Mark is very good in delivering the Scrum Training. Thank you for not repeating the mechanics!! Thanks for assidting with the dimensions around [Private Client] environment
Jack SPrivate Client
He knows his stuff!
Stephen DVancouver
Very informative and interesting introduction to the concepts and principles of Agile development and Scrum.
Michael HVancouver
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
Excellent course. Recommend for people that have done some Scrum and read all the readings. Mark is a great instructor. Among best I've had.
David MEdmonton
Mark is a great instructor for a difficult topic. The course was great to establish Agile/Scrum basics.
Hansil SPrivate Client

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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