Actively involving participants in business process modeling enables integration between elicitation and modeling steps of the BPM lifecycle. Such integration may lead to a more efficient design procedure and ultimately to a more accurate representation of the business process. However, active involvement of process participants creates several challenges, as the latter are not expected to have modeling skills. The purpose of this paper is to present a business process design approach, called CoMPArE /WP, which tightly integrates the elicitation and modeling stages of process design, through the active involvement of process participants. To achieve effective involvement of process participants, CoMPArE/WP adopts the principles of natural modeling. However, being a business process design approach aiming at supporting the whole BPM lifecycle, CoMPArE /WP deals also with the transition of natural modeling to formal process representations that can be enacted using a BPMS.
