BPM Lifecycle

The canonical six-phase model organising the discipline of BPM (sources/2018-dumas-fundamentals-of-bpm, §1.4). A hub concept — nearly every BPM paper in this wiki locates its contribution relative to one or more phases.

The six phases

Process Identification — designate which processes exist in the organisation and which deserve attention (→ process architecture + portfolio). Covered in ch. 2.
Process Discovery — elicit the current-state (as-is) process model from reality. Covered in ch. 5.
Process Analysis — identify and quantify issues with the as-is process:
- Qualitative analysis (value-added, waste, stakeholder, root-cause) — ch. 6.
- Quantitative analysis (flow analysis, queueing, simulation) — ch. 7.
Process Redesign — design the future-state (to-be) process. Covered in ch. 8; trade-offs per concepts/devils-quadrangle.
Process Implementation — execute the redesigned process via organisational change + IT deployment (BPMS, executable models). Ch. 9–10.
Process Monitoring & Controlling — observe the deployed process and detect deviations via process mining. Ch. 11.

Cycles back to identification/discovery as issues emerge.

Cross-cutting themes

Strategic alignment (ch. 12) overlays the entire cycle.
Governance, methods, IT, people, culture — the other five success factors of concepts/bpm-maturity.

Relation to APM

sources/2026-calvanese-agentic-bpm-manifesto cites the BPM lifecycle as the context within which framing must operate — a frame's "lifecycle management" creates, suspends, or destroys agents as the process evolves. concepts/self-modification (adaptation + evolution) is essentially an agentic analogue to lifecycle iteration.

Alternative formulation

Rosemann & vom Brocke (2015) recast the lifecycle in five stages: design · implementation · monitoring · improvement & innovation · project & program management — used as one dimension of the CAMAS Classification Framework. The mapping to Dumas's six-phase version is approximate (CAMAS folds identification into project/program management and analysis into design/improvement).

concepts/business-process · concepts/process-architecture · concepts/process-discovery · concepts/devils-quadrangle · concepts/process-aware-information-system · concepts/context-aware-bpm