I took a SAFe training class once, and they explained that Wal-Mart does this sort of exercise quarterly. Rents out a warehouse, flies in all the dev managers and leads, and does sprint planning using all the boards they have stood up everywhere.
I am not commenting on how effective it was for them of course. It seemed to me to be a bit overkill for the size of the company I was in (about 5k people).
I worked at a company that did something similar. IT was west coast and business stakeholders were east coast. Twice a year the business stakeholders would come out to present the current landscape, work out their roadmap, and maybe even focus on detailed requirements for immediate stories. At the end, the business stakeholders would all get in a room and present their roadmaps.
It worked pretty well. A few weeks of F2F with business folks built up some rapport if nothing else.
I’ve seen this work really well in a successful globally-distributed business with a few thousand employees, the majority being devs. The outcomes of building rapport between people who work intensely with each other a few weeks a year is hard to beat, except maybe by the impact of getting whole of business alignment including bigger and bigger groups inside the magic circle.
A couple of times a year, commercial, product and tech folks would run sort of iterative challenge/ opportunity/ response/ scoping exercises within their product area, then run a couple cross-area starting with most adjacent and ending at whole business. There’d be a roadshow cycle in major locations and online for all staff.
A big investment of time, but a lot of the priority and coordination issues, as well as unexploded bombs would come out of the woodwork.
For me it was interesting to see how this kind of regular big investment in time meant that the whole org ran very lean and very client- and market-responsive.
Here's a 2018 GDC session about the game developer Bungie using "big room planning". Once a quarter, 300 people (40 dev teams) come together in one big room to collaboratively plan their next quarter's deliverables and sprints.
It's absolutely useless to me. I cannot possibly sit there for hours, listen to other teams drone on about things that have nothing to do with me, and be expected to retain any of it. I can barely tolerate the "smaller" weekly ones where I have to listen for my name to read my script I wrote about what I did last week, and I'm very thankful for work from home because for the super long company-wide bullshit meetings where I don't participate I can simply mute it.
I am not commenting on how effective it was for them of course. It seemed to me to be a bit overkill for the size of the company I was in (about 5k people).