Usually the solution is to break your project into smaller modules, each of which can follow the normal lifecycle, and express your special-case requirement through module dependencies (e.g. maybe you have an integration test module).

IME the benefits of fixed phases outweigh the costs: any developer can pick up any maven project and immediately know how to build it, how to run the tests, and so on. A lot of other build systems are really bad for knowing where to start; allowing arbitrary task names and arbitrary relationships between what runs when just ends up with projects having pointless differences between what they call things - do I need to run "gradle build", "gradle install", or what? (and similarly for sbt etc.)