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 very knowledgable and an excellent communicator. So far my favourite Agile coach.
Fabricio MOttawa
Mark was very knowledgeable and a good communicator.
Boris VOttawa
After 24+ years of traditional thinking, this was refreshing and new. Can't wait to begin implementing at work. Thanks, Mark!
Kristine NEdmonton
Mark is very good. Has a lot of working experiences and real life stories.
Wilson MEdmonton
Mark was very engaging, and his training session helped to increase my knowledge of Agile and Scrum.
Tiffany MToronto
Mark is obviously very invested in the material. I never doubted that he was an expert with a lot of industry experience.
Devin ROttawa
Very good two days with excellent discussions. Mark was very adept at provoking these discussions.
Richard MOttawa
I found Mark very knowledgeable for the course material and good at getting his point across.
Shawn PMontreal
Very knowledgeable and well-versed in the art and science of Scrum and Agile. Clearly has a breadth of experience to share.
Sara MVirtual
Mark is a lively and engaging instructor. Information was presented effectively and at a reasonable pace.
Joel DOttawa
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 did a fantastic job. [Private Client] was a unique challenge of a long history with hardened habits, as well as a very peculiar definition of Agile and SCRUM.
Imran APrivate Client
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
Course was informative and entertaining. There was good participant involvement and useful examples.
George COttawa
Good course. In the end it is going to be us to make [Private Client] an even better company and a even better product.
Steve MPrivate Client
Mark is an awesome instructor. A very patient instructor that welcomes all questions. He is definitely the Yoda of the Scrum universe.
Ting-Yu LToronto
Really appreciated how he addressed our questions and gave feedback. Mark was very knowledgable on the subject matter.
Kyle AOttawa
Energetic, clear, helpful, inspiring, a great teacher.
Nadil POttawa
Mark is great and explained dry terms with examples.
Xueyan BPrivate Client
Mark was exteremly knowledgeable and enganging facilitor and I would not hesitate to recommend him to anyone looking to bbuild their agile. Thanks for the excellent course!
Mike WPrivate 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
Excellent material and great passion from Mark. The training went above my expectations.
Bryan TMontreal
Running the course as a Scrum project and including a real Scrum exchange really reinforced the material.
David COttawa
Excellent course and facilitator instruction.
John BVancouver
He is very engaging and clear. It was easy to grasp the concepts and apply it to exercises.
Jamielyn CToronto
Mark did an excellent job facilitating the course and the content was very helpful. We covered a lot of ground in three sessions and the pre-learning was helpful too! Mark was patient and respectful and very supportive throughout the sessions. It was a pleasure to spend the time with Mark and to learn from someone who obviously knows his subject.
Debbie BVirtual
Mark provides clarity into the mystical world of Agile and Scrum with practical examples and Jedi wisdom. Add some psychosocial games into the batch and your in for an adventure. Training will test not just your ability to obtain facts, but leave you pondering the cavernous opportunities for the scum master to be an agent of organizational change.
Petrus BVirtual
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
Solid grounding in Scrum and examples to apply it at work.
John CVancouver
Mark is a very engaging and thoughtful instructor and presented material that was relevent to the goup and our interests. This was an excellent course and worth the time commitment.
Victor COttawa
Great course, absurdly knowledgeable instructor. Does pushups.
Igor TToronto
Excellent. 5 on the scale of 1 to 5.
Suhas KToronto
Mark is very knowledgeable and open/fair when answering questions or comments from the class. The course did a great job of covering scrum.
Darryl COttawa
Mark was good - foundatian of knowledge and his experiences made for good practical examples.
Mike AMontreal
Mark is extremely knowledgeable and passionate about the subject matter and topics adjacent to it. His attitude encourages engagement in the material.
Jamie CVirtual
Great course Mark! I really enjoyed learning more about the framwork and listening to others point of view.
Sarah MToronto
Mark was very knowledgeable. He knows how to engage the class. I enjoyed his sharing of resources and experience.
Amanda YEdmonton
Objective when needed and directs us to the conclusions. Interesting course.
Andre MMontreal
I participated in the Certified Scrum Master course instructed by Mark Levison. Mark is a very well educated in the Agile Scrum methodology and presented the course material in a very entertaining way during the 2-day course. I learned a lot of things I had not previously known even though I had been practicing scrum for the past 5 years. I would highly recommend that every organization send their scrum focal’s to this training – it will help them advance their organization in implementing, and delivering scrum based projects, thus help their business be more successful.
Graham FVirtual
I have a hard time with classroom training however you managed to keep me interested. The way you deliver the material is great.
Patrick VOttawa
It is very well organized and timed. The teacher has a really deep, hands-on knowledge about the subject.
Alberto MPrivate Client
Great session overall. Appreciate your openness and honesty.
Lisa FToronto
Mark did an excellent job of teaching the material and went beyond just presenting it.
Noah AEdmonton
Mark knows the subject very well. He was never boring. He has offered good references for us to continue studying on our own.
Melanie LPrivate Client
The course itself is a great introduction to the Scrum Master role. It starts with the fundamentals and advances through a successful balance of instruction and interactive exercises. Our instructor - Mark Levison - is obviously an expert in his field and passionate about the subject. He displayed great skill in getting his message across to his students and also in keeping us interested and involved throughout the three day course.
Sean SVirtual
The course and exercise were well designed to add value compared to reading about Scrum. Mark is an effective presenter, keeping things interesting and (often) entertaining.
Gordon EPrivate Client
Very knowledgeable instructor, great info on theory and practice. Lots more info to cover if we had more time.
Jamie GOttawa
Extremely knowledgeable. Engaged the entire team. Clear communication.
Ahalya AToronto
Mark's session was a great combination of theory, practical exercises and real life stories that kept this learner engaged and involved. Time spent was definitely worthwhile. Thanks!
Justin LVirtual
Excellent instructor!!! Expert in Agile/Scrum.
Marc BOttawa

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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