according to the teachings herein , provisioning operations carried out via electronic processing in a communication network benefit from the use of reordered workflows having task orderings that are at least partly optimized with respect to task failure probabilities and / or resource - blocking penalties . the reordered workflows are obtained by optimizing predefined provisioning workflows . each predefined workflow comprises two or more tasks ordered along one or more task execution paths in a task tree , according to a default task ordering that reflects any required inter - task dependencies but , in general , does not reflect any optimization in terms of failure penalties , resource blocking , etc . among the several advantages provided by the teachings herein , carrying out provisioning operations in accordance with reordered workflows wastes fewer compute cycles and reduces the needless blocking of network resources in the event of provisioning task failures .