Nice post. The further up you go (3-5), the more customized it has to be for every company–guidelines, no cookbook. For example, I recently had to work with a client (hardware & software) who was using a specific product development phase-gate system. Integrating agile & a phase-gate system isn’t something you do for many clients, but it’s necessary in some cases and a multi-step process.

A cookbook tells when to add what ingredients to make the dish. A model or approach like this tries to teach about a cuisine of cooking.

A cookbook would tell you when to add coaches, tools, training, and infrastructure. A cookbook tells you how long to take at each step.

I think those are the kinds of things that have to be tailored to your situation. I believe prescriptive approaches have to be tailored, but based on certain cuisine.

(Shameless plug on the metaphor – can’t avoid it:)
At Rally, we serve a healthy dose of pragmatic, bottom-up lead, whole organizational visible and results-based cuisine to agile adoption. But every meal is custom designed with customer’s who want a partner. When they choose to partner with us, they get “success guaranteed” by a set of world class teams of coaches, technical account managers, support engineers and sales professionals. These professionals take our Agile Lifecycle Management platform and help you weave it into your organization in ways that deliver well documented results at each step along the way to being an expert. (See video’s on web page and agile impact report)

I sure hope that helps understand my mental model?
Ryan

Ignore this and you will most likely get stuck there.

Furthermore, this faces the same problem of ignoring the human step in these transitions. It will take as long as it takes for people to begin accepting the agile process – letting go of things that used to matter (detailed specs, etc) and embracing things they are not used to (close customer-developer interaction, etc).