Sorry about that...I definitely see how explaining why normal paths like building it into the process definition aren't a possibility would help people that are kind enough to help me... and hopefully others who might be searching for answers later. To answer your questions... anonymous wrote : Hundereds of tasks? Wow.... what kind of branch is that? Highly regulated customers of ours like pharmas and medical device manufacturers with international scope frequently require many-many people review / approve things before they are ready for production (legal, regulatory, marketing, managers etc.). anonymous wrote : What is a "workflow managers"? A kind of admin? Correct. Project/workflow managers can be aware of certain tasks that may not need to be performed for one reason or another. In many cases this can be when "cycles" (i.e. rejection or back transitions) happen and tasks are re-executed for a process instance. The project manager may say these tasks won't be needed this iteration and skip/cancel them. anonymous wrote : Give him the jBPM console and he can 'cancel' all the tasks he wants and/or reassign to anyone. The problem is that I believe you can only cancel after task instance are created. In my case, a task may need to be marked as skipped/cancelled before the instance ever gets created... which is where I was getting into trouble trying to cancel/skip the task based on a variable when the workflow traverses through the canceled task node. Example: the manager sees that marketing has already provided sufficient review and will "cancel" their task so that they won't be presented with it when the workflow progresses to their piece. anonymous wrote : you can always unlock the token if you are fairly sure you are the only one acting on it. I thought about that... just wasn't sure if that was the way to do this (i.e. reacting to events in the workflow and canceling the tasks if they are flagged as such). Also... just an FYI... we are actually using the jBPM libraries and have our own front end. Thanks for much for all the help! View the original post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4230105#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...