Software lifecycle is the process by which software is conceived, developed, maintained, and decommissioned. To the development team, initiating effective application lifecycle management (ALM) is challenging for three reasons. (1) ALM definition is hard since lifecycle activities are interdependent and complex in nature that involves product, project, people, process, tool and technology. (2) ALM activities require the support of correctly tailored tools. (3) Effective ALM activities execution requires discipline. To take on the three challenges of initiating ALM, we present a new approach called Rapid Application Lifecycle Management (RALM). RALM provides a reference model with a number of templates for ALM activity definition. Once customized, the templates are converted into platform-specific process definition files with tool support. Observations from a field application of RALM are presented and discussed.