“The management review aims to provide evidence-based analyses and options for the Secretary General in order to improve the effectiveness, the agility, and the flexibility of the Secretariat in carrying out prior-ity actions for the benefit of the participating States.”26
The OSCE Secretariat has grown organically over a period of more than two decades. The management processes have had to adapt to new challenges, the increasing work-load, the shifting priorities of the participating states, and ever-tighter budgets. They have done so in an ad hoc manner. In addition to this, the realities of daily working life have been transformed by new technologies and modern business practices. It is therefore high time that the central management processes of the Secretariat un-dergo a systematic review so that measures for improving efficacy and efficiency can be identified. In April 2018, the Secretariat Management Review (SMR) started. This pro-cess was broad in scope and required the involvement of
26 See footnote 7.
all the staff at the Secretariat, with the entire manage-ment committee acting as its steering body. A leading consulting firm provided considerable assistance over the first one-and-a-half years of the SMR. All in all, some 80 optimization measures were pursued. At its sixth and fi-nal meeting on 8 July 2020, the steering committee es-tablished that 68 out of 77 measures had been imple-mented, two had been abandoned, and seven had been continued in separate processes. The complexity of the different measures varied considerably. The Secretariat deliberately started with the simpler ones, giving us room to create the necessary dynamic that would enable us to tackle the more challenging measures too. Text box 3 lists some of the measures implemented.
Text Box 3: Selected Implemented Measures of the SMR
• In the controlling and budget sphere, cost trans-parency has been improved significantly thanks to better controlling and reporting tools.
• A new travel management tool has reduced the amount of time spent on travel administration and travel costs.
• A new online registration tool and conference management guidelines have been created for more efficient conference management.
• In the procurement sphere, framework agree-ments and an increase in the threshold for low-value contracts has reduced administrative outlay.
• A new electronic recruitment platform has been introduced, freeing up resources that could then be used to create more robust selection processes for upper management positions.
• The induction process for new OSCE staff has been moved online, and it now includes all new starters and not just international staff.
• The approval process for extra-budgetary projects has been overhauled, and it is now able to distin-guish between low- and high-risk projects. This has also made it possible to bring in an accelerated process for urgent cases. As a result, a further training workshop costing 10,000 EUR is no longer treated in the same way as a small arms program costing several million Euros and spanning multiple years.
Areas targeted by SMR optimizations also included logis-tics, building management, internal coordination, com-munication, and the digitalization of personnel manage-ment and paymanage-ment processes. In relation to many of these measures, a pattern began to emerge: Introducing digital technology made it possible to improve performance while saving costs. Even though the SMR was not intend-ed as a cost-cutting initiative, but rather as a way of ad-justing the strategic direction and creating greater added value, it led to savings of around 300,000 EUR in 2019.
Thanks to the wealth of management information it gen-erated, the SMR has also provided a more useful starting point for making the cutbacks required under the nomi-nal zero-growth strategy imposed by the participating states.
There is considerable potential for savings in one area that, owing to its complexity, has not been fully realized: the creation of shared service centers, which can be set up in cost-efficient locations. At its final meeting, the SMR steering committee agreed that it would pursue the creation of shared service centers for four areas, while rejecting the idea for others.27 However, these approach-es are not entirely new, even for the OSCE itself. IT sup-port for the Secretariat is already provided mainly from Sarajevo. Furthermore, one of the first SMR measures to be implemented was to merge the Records Management Unit (RMS) in Vienna with the OSCE Documentation Cen-ter in Prague. The merged unit would then remain in Prague, the more cost-efficient of the two locations. An-other major area where SMR initiatives have yet to come to fruition is the strategy for resource mobilization. This covers extra-budgetary funding, as well as non-cash con-tributions from state and non-state actors. Work is need-ed here to create a more strategic framework for using extra-budgetary resources – in view of budgetary reali-ties, this is the only opportunity for expansion within the organization. A further goal is to cooperate more often and more systematically with new actors such as devel-opment agencies, private foundations, and the economy at large. In addition to a resource mobilization concept, an action plan has been drawn up for implementing the new strategy and for consolidating internal coordination mechanisms.
The SMR shone a light on issues surrounding process organization. However, initial observations also focused on the organizational structure. A quick win, the aforementioned merging of the RMS with the OSCE Doc-umentation Center in Prague, was achieved. Similar deci-sive action was taken with the pooling of ICT functions within the relevant unit of the Department of
Manage-27 1) Standardization/automation of accounts payable; 2) Pooling supplier data management; 3) Standardize/relocate HR administration; 4) Relo-cating non-core IT functions. Meanwhile, following a detailed review, it was decided not to go ahead with centralizing the procurement activi-ties in a center of excellence and relocating the payroll system to a more cost-efficient site.
ment and Finance (DMF). Moreover, it was agreed that the ethics coordinator and the gender equality unit should answer directly to the Secretary General. However, resis-tance from the participating states during the budget process continues to hinder the implementation of these measures. Other ideas remain that require further flesh-ing out, such as the possibility of creatflesh-ing a unit for inter-nal justice issues and defining its place in the hierarchy, or pooling the support functions in a unit for resource mobi-lization and programming.
By their very nature, any changes to the organi-zational structure of the Secretariat – no matter how plausible – are politically contentious. This is because they fall within the scope of the post table28 and are therefore in a part of the budget that requires consensus.
Another fine example of the difficulties experienced in this regard was the attempt to formalize the position of a second Deputy Head of the Secretariat in the 2020 bud-get process. Because the OSCE does not want to fund a full-time Deputy Secretary General, the tasks of the dep-uty formally fall solely on the shoulders of the Director of the Conflict Prevention Centre (CPC), who already has nu-merous responsibilities. For this reason, I made the Direc-tor of the Office of the Secretary General (OSG) a second Deputy Head of the Secretariat. The division of tasks came naturally: The Director of the CPC took on the depu-ty role for external matters relating to the conflict cycle, while the OSG Director was responsible for internal and management-related issues. This arrangement proved ef-fective in practice and was never questioned by any of the participating states. Yet despite its resounding success, when I sought to formally transfer this structure into the organization chart (which was, in effect, synonymous with the post table), one Head of Mission and their dele-gation took it upon themselves to bury it under procedur-al pretenses. Sadly, this is a characteristic example of the limited scope for action available to the Secretary Gener-al, even where management matters are concerned.
28 The post table is a list of all staff positions and is annexed to the Unified Budget.