1. Identify a change leader who has organizational change management experience. Look for people who have helped with mergers and acquisitions or significant business process changes.
2. Have a clear vision and concrete plan. The organization's senior leadership must remain involved with any major change initiative, and change management staff must step up early to understand management's vision.
3. Align with the change, and be ready to support it. Change management teams must spread supporters and change agents around the organization and groom them to be advocates for change.
4. Develop training and informational activities to support the business process change. Change management teams can alleviate some of the anxiety created by change by sharing detailed plans via learning activities that will help employees prepare for their new roles.
5. Communicate the change message. Communicate, communicate, communicate. You need to help employees through the change and try to connect it to something employees care about.
6. Execute the change management plans. From our research, we learned that if the project manager and change manager work separately and don't collaborate, the change management initiative will likely fail.
7. Celebrate short-term successes. Establish milestones along the way and celebrate with rewards, recognition and praise. Supervisors should recognize the work of their individual direct reports and executives should continuously communicate progress and publicly recognize people who have made special efforts.
8. Align your process improvement methodology with change management. Teams must take time to align process improvement methodologies with selected change management approaches so that key milestones link with key activities in change management.
9. Check the pulse of the organization through continuous feedback data. Compliance audits demonstrate who is engaging in the new process, but employees should also give feedback through online surveys, focus groups and informal discussions held with stakeholders and supporters.
10. Be focused and disciplined and stay the course to sustain the new culture. Business change management must be constant and sustained through continual reinforcement.

CLAIRE SCHOOLEY is a senior analyst at Forrester Research. She will be keynoting at Forrester's Business Process Forum, September 22-23, 2011 in Boston, MA.