The UNFCCC secretariat is developing a user-friendly platform to facilitate meetings and engagement that Negotiation Parties may wish to convene and/or participate in. This Platform has supported thousands of participants with planning their schedules, watching live sessions and networking at SBs and COP26.

• Managed senior level stakeholder expectations, including UN agency leaders, vendor executives, and government officials.

• Served as an effective spokesperson for the project and establishes collaboration and partnerships with key officials at all levels within the organizations and beyond.

• Led multi-disciplinary and cross-functional teams in project development, implementation, monitoring and assessment.

• Ensured alignment across delivery teams who may represent resources from multiple internal (UNFCCC, client teams) and external sources (vendors, consultancies, product teams).

• Directed review of relevant documents and reports; identify and initiate follow-up actions

• Identified priorities, problems and issues to be addressed and propose corrective actions

• Drove prioritization and feasibility discussions, including recording decisions requiring trade-offs

• Managed scope and decision process around any changes to expected project outcomes, delivery commitments, and/or schedule

• Ensured end-to-end solution delivery perspective taking into consideration technical components, as well as tangential and relevant processes, training, and communications

• Developed a framework and rigor for governance, decision making, dependency and risk management

• Provided a path toward issue identification and remediation with early escalation and impact analysis

• Identified resources necessary for delivery, including required subject matter experts for guidance when needed

• Led development of and continuous management of project roadmaps, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) related to project delivery. Exercised due financial diligence of overall project budget, actuals, and forecast and develop a contingency plan

• Ensured a good cooperation spirit between the different teams and the well-being of the staff assigned to the project.

• Leveraged existing ICT technologies and tools to the extent possible.

The sustainable meeting hub is expected to lead to increased participation by developing Nations into the UN process and in less travel needed to achieve this increased participation. It will be further used by small delegations to increase their involvement rates in meetings during large conferences such as the Conference of Parties (COP). The solution allows to broadcast meetings so that the event can be viewed by an audience which is larger than the normal maximum number of participants.

This project is financed by the Government of Germany and is developed with a service provider in Spain. The project was already running for five months. The initial analysis of the project discovered that many stakeholders of the project were unattended, that major documents were missing, that a quality strategy was not existing, the envisaged technology was potentially not suitable for the project purpose, the financials of the project were unclear and a design for the subsequent service did not exist. Based on the shortcomings of the current state the following actions were planned and executed:

• Establishment of a communication strategy

• Liaising with external project sponsors, e.g. Government of Germany

• Buy-in of internal stakeholders like the upper management and the department which will run the service

• Management of vendors and licenses

• Creation and approval of needed documents like the project initiation document (PID) and a project plan

• Creation and communication of regular documents, e.g. project highlight reports

• Initiation and execution of needed meetings and reviews for instance project board meetings and stage gate reviews

• Creation of a project plan with synchronization of deliverables with the vendor and the ability for internal resources to book their time

• Initiation of several workshops to discuss the design of the subsequent service with colleagues from other departments

• Liaising with external project sponsors, e.g. Government of Germany

• The project is now in a healthy state and it is ongoing.

The Data Center Consolidation Project (DCCP) project aimed to achieve optimization of the current infrastructure through consolidation in a cloud environment by:

• Harmonization of the hosting across multiple applications

• Simplification of administration and overhead processes thereby reducing costs

• Provision of a scalable environment

• Reduction of operational risks

• Increased quality and availability

• Increased Disaster Recovery (DR) capability

• Reduction of hardware replacement costs

• Reduced carbon footprint of server infrastructure

The UNFCCC ran three different data-center with locations in Bonn, London and across Switzerland. Around 200 applications where hosted widespread over three different development stacks and platforms. Most of these applications are mission critical and support stakeholders of the UNFCCC around the world in all time zones. Beside the technical risk, the risk of unknown quality of applications and the number of stakeholders were key in the project. Both items were addressed due out the project and resulted in a smooth and successful migration with no quality issues or unplanned interruption of services.

• Created a software waste management software system allowing clients to implement the legal requirements of the waste acts into their businesses that could also be tailored to suit their individual requirements and needs. Devised a software application based on the European Seveso II Directive to assist businesses with its implementation, management and interpretation of the rules

• Built successful strategic partnerships through proactively identifying potential markets, projects and clients; cultivated and maintained effective and strong relationships with regulatory authorities and business partners