One of the teams I manage does use a 'plan build ship' system. The cycles are relatively short though. The whole plan, build, ship cycle is about 4 weeks. But i

One of the teams I manage does use a 'plan build ship' system. The cycles are relatively short though. The whole plan, build, ship cycle is about 4 weeks. But it's a little more complex than that. I do the planning for the next cycle while the team is working on build and ship for the current cycle (or sprint if you prefer.). One book I came across, that I found interesting, was 'Shape Up' from Basecamp[1]. The ideas around shaping the work that needs to be done are interesting. The book, essentially, somewhat formalises what most teams are probably doing during the planning phase. You need a period of fuzzy exploration during the early stages of a project. For example the team I'm managing is trying to find product/market fit, so the there is no well defined series of tasks initially. The goal of planning is to define these tasks. Most of the time time that means building several exploratory prototypes and showing them to users and iterating on that. Or exploring concepts etc. This is the work I do in parallel with production development for features we know are necessary and well-defined. [1] https://basecamp.com/shapeup https://basecamp.com/shapeup