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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Brilliant! Engaging and enlightening while not promising the world.
Oksana KOttawa
Fantastic instructor. Great real story examples.
Allan CEdmonton
Mark inspired the participants to be engaged in the moment using Plato's dialogue techniques - Mark delights!
Laura DOttawa
Mark kept the room alive and was more than informative.
Morgan SPrivate Client
Very knowledgeable, enjoy the practical examples that were shared.
Tina MEdmonton
Amazing! Given the time a lot was covered about Scrum.
Hanumanth Reddy POttawa
You'll spend two great days with amazing people around and learn a lot while laughing. Take this course!
Stephane LMontreal
Mark was excellent and lots of knowledge and passion about Scrum. His anecdotal stories were entertaining and informational.
Kevin MPrivate Client
Mark Levinson is very knowledgeable in Scrum and has the ability to start you on the right track given your specific workplace problems. He is also able to generalize issues and show how they can be solved with the tools provided in the course.
Hatem NVirtual
Interesting facilitation of a topic that could have been not so interesting.
Jeff MEdmonton
Mark is Great! I took a CSM course from him 11 years ago, hence I picked this course again 11 years later.
Justin LVirtual
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
Mark is super knowledgable on the topic and presents it in a fun and educational atmosphere. Really enjoyed the team work and Mark's perspective on a lot of the information.
Shelly MToronto
Mark presented very well. Class well organized. Liked the zoo activity and actually applying the scrum guidleines to a sprint.
Laurel PEdmonton
Mark has been a great facilitator, instructor, and extremely knowledgeable on teaching Scrum. Great analogies and references cited.
Wilfred MPrivate Client
Mark did a great job of keeping the class engaged and deployed many useful techniques to get the course material across.
Tharaneesan NPrivate Client
Brilliantly said. I am happy to be part of this Scrum Product owner course.
Esva PMontreal
Fantastic course. I was really happy with the structure, the breaks, and the group interaction. I've taken other online courses like this before and really felt like there was a good balance between listening, discussions, applying the knowledge, and pauses.
Amanda PVirtual
Very knowledgeable instructor that kept the course interesting. Course material was awesome! I will recommend to others.
Dave PToronto
Mark Levison was an excellent instructor: knowledgeable, personable, and very approachable. The course material was clear and I felt like the coverage was appropriate.
Ken MMontreal
Very informative course on the use of Scrum for software development. It covers all the areas of scrum, including all the key players and demonstrates how the roles, responsibilities and process work together to create effective, self organizing teams.
Amera PEdmonton
Greatly impressed by the teaching style and format of the course. Much appreciate the sprint style format and the engagment level of the instructor.
Hatem NOttawa
Mark is very knowledgeable and is great at simplifying and illustrating abstract concepts.
Thierry LMontreal
Great training with an engaging trainer and hands on practice. The content made you think about the best solutions and how to prioritize workflow. The instructor provided tangible guidance on best practices.
Sneha NVirtual
Personable and enjoyable. When subject drift happens he is very quick to refocus the class.
Dustin SEdmonton
The material/presentation were top notch. Demontrations/examples were very good. Instructor is enthusiastic, knowledgeable.
Norm RKitchener-Waterloo
Mark is a great instructor for a difficult topic. The course was great to establish Agile/Scrum basics.
Hansil SPrivate Client
Mark is simply a very knowledgeable and engaging instructor. Great experience.
Emad MPrivate Client
I like to recommend this course to other team members to help everyone get to the same mindset and understanding. I gained a clearer understanding of what Agile really is and I'd like to see it work in my future projects.
Lynda SEdmonton
Instructor was very entertaining and knowledgeable. I believe the course was well aligned to the scrum methodology. Very clever.
Ravi SEdmonton
Clear and open to questions, provides good examples that help illustrate the process.
Radu SPrivate Client
Good course. Good instructor. No boring moments.
Ashishkumar PMontreal
Training style great. Open to discussions and various viewpoints. Helpful. Wants to make sure we all understand. Takes time to discuss further if required. Manages the agenda/time with group consensus/agreement.
Meredith SToronto
Mark was great and full of recommendations. He was also very knowledgeable and able to answer all our questions.
Chris MPrivate Client
I truly enjoyed every minute spent in this classroom! This course has inspired me to follow my path so that my dreams come true!
Stela LVancouver
Very knowlegable on the topic. Able to communicate message effectively through stories.
Nish SVancouver
Mark is insightful, a pleasure to listen to, and inspires me toward making the changes needed so that I can work out a high-performance team.
Mike SVancouver
There was not a single bit of content that wasn't helpful.
Bruno PMontreal
Mark is a great instructor who clearly understands his subject matter and continuously engages with his students in order to make his presentations dynamic and memorable. He maintained a good pace throughout the workshop while always ensuring that questions were answered and that nobody would be left behind. Thanks Mark!
Mikael SVirtual
Lively, hands on, enlightening. Would recommend.
Allen NEdmonton
Great course. Mark clearly knows his stuff!
Marc LOttawa
Mark is very knowledgeable and he was very patient in explaining the topics to us.
Mary Angeli MKitchener-Waterloo
I liked Mark. I think he answered all the questions really well and engaged the group in very good discussion. The prep work was very helpful and I do not feel like I missed out on anything because it was virtual. It was well organized!
Raji RVirtual
Excellent. Loved the real world experience brought to the course.
Jason MOttawa
This is one of the best courses I took. I liked the 'hands on' scrum technique. I liked the open discussions and how the instructor motivated people and kept them engaged.
Magda SOttawa
The course was great and really opened my eyes on all the ways that I could help my team succeed. I like how the instructor kept us engaged, even though a virtual class, and kept as all accountable during the 3-day course.
Marie-Alice SVirtual
I really enjoyed the course. Mark really understands the topic and is willing to go into great depth about items the students wished. Very enjoyable.
Mark MKitchener-Waterloo
Very knowledgeable and very fun and interesting way to deliver the content.
Eric SToronto
Mark was great! He kept the room energized and very engaged. His passion and pexereince were very evident. Class materials were very helpful! Great focus on how to drive results.
Aaron MPrivate Client
Instructor was very knowledgeable. Situations we brought forward he was able to help us detemine the source of the issue without telling us. Great coach!
Elsie SEdmonton

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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