A system and method are disclosed which enable flexibility in configuring management behavior of a management system. More specifically, according to a preferred embodiment, management behavior is controlled by management policies that specify management actions to be performed for managing a communication network, for example. A user may specify the management actions to be performed by a management policy and the process flow to be utilized by the management policy in performing such management actions. Thus, not only are the particular management actions to be performed by the management policy configurable by the user, but the process flow in performing such management actions is also configurable by the user. Accordingly, the user has great flexibility in configuring the behavior of a management policy as desired.