UN Award 21

Mark Ryszewski of OCHR has been awarded for his project. The prize has been given the Director general of UNOG, Mr. Sergei Ordzhonikidze.

Introduced in 1996 by the Secretary-General, the UN 21 AWARDS were established as part of the management reform effort. The award provides recognition and special thanks to staff members for outstanding achievements in improving efficiency. The applications for 2002 were reviewed by a panel of five judges from 30 different Departments, OAHs and Duty Stations. Once two winners were selected from each category, the UN 21 Awards Advisory Panel reviewed the recommended projects and affirmed the selections. There were many outstanding projects and each candidate should be commended Intranet based Lumpsum Information Request

This project has made a significant improvement in the processing of information requests concerning lump-sum entitlements. The previous process was fully manual, involving paper requests moving back and forth, up to 5 locations. A time consuming and frustrating exercise, requests were often lost or misplaced and much effort spent on tracking their status.

To address this predicament, an Intranet based system was set up which allowed live information tracking by all system users. The new workflow is based on information flowing electronically from actor to actor with automatic generation of e-mails alerting individuals when action on their part is required, leading to the production of a final lump-sum request containing all the information necessary for entry into IMIS.

Manual processes of several executive offices were analyzed, and the best practices from each department were combined to streamline the workflow and design the information system.

The project was implemented in 3 major phases:

1. Pilot tested in two departments;

2. System implemented in 20 departments and offices, after introduction of enhancement based on feedback from the pilot;

3. Live access of system provided to all missions, with modifications to address the special needs of DPKO mission-based staff members.

The system has been in place for over two years, and has a widely-held reputation of being a great improvement on the previous paper process – easy to use, reliable and quick. The time for processing a request was reduced from an average of three weeks to one to five days. The number of follow-up inquires regarding lost and misplaced lump sum requests has dropped by over 90%.

The organization has benefited not only from the time-savings gained in the Executive Offices’ handling and processing lump-sum requests, but also efficiency gains from the increased accuracy and transparency of information for all system users and use of fewer paper-based forms.