HRSD Lifecycle Event – Existing Employee Movement Cases Stuck After Activity Set Dependency Change

[sreeha]

Hi Community,

We have an HRSD Lifecycle Event for Employee Movement with approximately 15 Activity Sets, where the Activity Sets are executed sequentially based on dependencies.

For example:

Activity Set 1 → Activity Set 2 → Activity Set 3 → …

Recently, we changed the configuration around the Leadership Approval and Medical Assessment activities.

Previous configuration

Previously, we had:

Leadership Approval → Medical Assessment

The Medical Assessment Activity Set was dependent on the completion of the Leadership Approval Activity Set.

New configuration

As part of a recent production deployment, the previous Leadership Activity Set was deactivated and replaced with two Activity Sets:

1-UP Leadership Approval → 2-UP Leadership Approval → Medical Assessment

The Medical Assessment dependency was also changed to depend on the 2-UP Leadership Approval Activity Set.

Issue

After deployment, some existing Employee Movement cases that were created before the deployment are getting stuck at the old Leadership Approval Activity Set and are not progressing to the next Activity Set.

The new cases created after deployment appear to follow the new configuration.

Our current understanding is that the existing cases may still have the old Activity Set Context / generated Activity Set structure from the time the cases were created. Therefore, changing or deactivating the Lifecycle Event configuration may not automatically rebuild the Activity Set Context for already-created cases.

Please suggest some possible solution for the existing cases

[sachinvic]

@sreeha 

Hi,

The behavior described is expected for existing Lifecycle Event cases. The Activity Set Context is generated when the case progresses through the lifecycle, so changing the dependency in the Lifecycle Event configuration does not necessarily rebuild the already-generated context for existing cases.

For the existing Employee Movement cases, first check:

HR Lifecycle Event Case >> Activity Set Context

Verify the state and dependency of the old Leadership Approval Activity Set.

For cases already stuck, the safer approach would be:

1. Identify the affected existing cases.
2. Confirm the old Activity Set Context/dependency that was generated for those cases.
3. Complete or resolve the old Activity Set according to the actual business outcome.
4. Allow the next Activity Set to trigger, or manually move the case forward only after validating the context.
5. Test this with a few affected cases before applying the same correction in bulk.

I would not recommend directly deleting/recreating Activity Set Context records as the first option, since these records are part of the lifecycle execution state.

For future configuration changes, test the modified Lifecycle Event against existing and newly created cases before deploying to Production. ServiceNow also recommends caution when modifying Lifecycle Events while there are ongoing cases.

One important distinction: if the requirement is that the new dependency must apply to cases that already exist, don't assume that updating the Lifecycle Event definition will automatically migrate those cases. The existing execution context needs to be handled separately.

Helpful? Please mark the response as Accepted Solution ✅ and close the thread  — this helps future readers find the solution faster.

Regards,
Sachinvic
✨ ArchX Certified | ✨ 16x ServiceNow AI MVP