Central Planning and Coordination Division
The two major planks of the Department’s conference management work – meetings and documentation – come together in the Central Planning and Coordination Division, whose work takes place in recurring cycles. It starts with forecasting, the determination of exactly what work lies ahead so that everything can be properly planned and coordinated. Before any meeting can take place and before any document can be processed, a painstaking examination must be made of all conference servicing requirements, as spelled out in the legislation of the intergovernmental bodies, both for meetings and for documentation. Those requirements, once established, are then plotted against a time frame and service capacity to ensure that all requests can be met in the most timely and efficient fashion.
In addition, given the limitations of physical resources such as conference and meeting rooms and servicing staff – those who provide documentation and interpretation services, a balance between needs and capacity must be found. An overload in the meetings sector at a given time, for example, would result in an excess in the documentation workload. The Division ensures that such situations are avoided. Sophisticated IT applications are instrumental in planning and managing conference services.
Once all conference servicing requirements and the expected timing of their delivery have been set down in writing – in the form of a meetings calendar or a documentation forecast, the work of the Division shifts from planning and forecasting to execution. Manuscripts are received and processed; official documents are issued and delivered to those bodies that have requested them at the time they are needed. Conferences and meetings can take place with the services they require, as they do every day in the life of the Organization.
The Division includes the following organizational units:
- Documents Planning Unit
- Documents Control Unit
- Meetings Management Section
- Monitoring, Evaluation, Risk Assessment and Statistical Verification Unit (MERS).
Last Update: 23 January 2014/ Ruth RAMIREZ