Cirque du Soleil
ServiceNow Developer
Automated the employee lifecycle for a global live-entertainment company across ServiceNow and SuccessFactors
Two years shipping ServiceNow inside one of the most recognisable live-entertainment brands in the world: onboarding and termination on autopilot, workspace reservation on the mobile app, catalog consolidated into order guides.
The problem
HR was managing employee onboarding and termination manually across a large, distributed workforce that included touring shows around the world. Each new hire required someone to trigger provisioning requests one system at a time, and each departure created a scramble to reclaim access before it lapsed silently.
The service catalog had grown organically for years. Requesting a laptop, a badge, a software licence, and a mailbox for a new hire meant four separate tickets that no single person owned end to end.
Why it was hard
Every touring show was a variant of the standard workflow, with its own local IT, HR and access rules. A one-size solution would have shipped fast and been useless within a month.
The catalog had accumulated for years without a single owner. Cleaning it while shipping meant sequencing changes carefully so no active request broke mid-flight.
SuccessFactors events are not always in the order the business assumes. A termination event can arrive before its matching hire event when someone is rehired. The integration had to survive that.
The approach
Implemented a custom ServiceNow solution to automate onboarding and termination. When SuccessFactors published a hire or termination event, ServiceNow ran the full provisioning or deprovisioning workflow. Approvals fired automatically to the right owner, and the audit trail kept a record HR could actually review.
Modernised the ServiceNow catalog by building order guides that consolidated multi-item provisioning into one request. A new-hire guide asked one set of questions and generated every downstream ticket that had previously been raised by hand.
Deployed the Workplace Service Delivery module so employees could reserve a desk from the ESC portal or the Now Mobile app, using an interactive floor plan instead of a shared spreadsheet.
The outcome
End-to-end HR lifecycle automated. The onboarding and termination flows that had lived in coordination email threads now fire from the HR system automatically, with a reviewable audit trail on every event.
Provisioning requests consolidated: one guide, one form, one owner per new-hire cohort instead of a spread across catalog items.
Desk reservation live in Now Mobile for staff who don't sit at a fixed workstation.
You have this problem if
- Your HR system publishes hire and termination events, but IT provisioning still runs by hand
- Onboarding a single new hire requires four or more separate tickets that nobody owns end to end
- Off-boarding lag means access lingers past someone's last day and gets caught in the next audit
- Your operations run across multiple locations or business units with local variations in workflow
What I take from this
Enterprise workflow automation is 20% about the platform and 80% about mapping the real human workflow. Every touring show had a variant. The value came from getting that map right before writing a single script. The same discipline drives every Groundwork engagement I run today for smaller Quebec SMBs.
How this shows up in my work today
Same discipline, smaller room. A Quebec SMB preparing to spend its Loi 1% training budget rarely has SuccessFactors and rarely has ServiceNow. It has a dozen workflows that live in the head of one senior person and a spreadsheet that got emailed around. A ten-day async Groundwork engagement is the workflow-mapping work that has to happen before any automation, AI or otherwise, is worth writing.