I'm wondering what does "your application is currently in queue for review by an officer" really means;
1) Are our cases in a queue that is waiting to picked up by a random officer?
- Officers surf through the queue and randomly pick up a case and have it reviewed and put it back in queue or send it a different department.
Or
2) An officer has been assigned to our case and s/he has our cases in his/her queue?
- Cases in the queue are numbered based on some internal system. The officer clears the queue by reviewing the cases one by one to eventually get to our cases.
Hehe No idea! For me I interpret the email as such:
Good day: Let's start with a courteous greeting that's an official correspondence... But
Please be informed that your application is currently in queue for review by an officer: Don't think that we have only your file to assess, we have plenty! So behave yourself and wait for your turn.
Unfortunately, we are not able to provide you with a date on which your file will be reviewed: We are doing all we can here you know! So let us do our job. We are going to do it properly at the right pace and as it should regardless of how much time it will take.
Please be assured that you will be contacted immediately should further information be required or regarding the next steps in your file: No need to contact us again, and...
We thank you for your patience and for keeping your correspondence to a minimum: Try not to contact us again and let us do our job.
Voilà!!!
No seriously. You know I worked as an officer myself in a central administration assessing projects for my country. I was drowning under their files! I had like 20 assigned to me each time and when one goes, two come along. It's not an easy task to give final approval and the responsibility is quite heavy. This responsibility made me and the team scrutinize everything because if something goes wrong in the future, they come to the officer, so assessment needed to be done as comprehensively as possible. Projects start according to the date they come in but then each one takes a different route depending on the 'priority' of the project, how big it is, and how long any additional needed information from outside sources would take to be available. Many times the following file in the queue was picked while another one was pending because waiting for new data (or review with senior). Almost everything needed to go through the approval of the seniors, who had other unrelated, more advanced tasks, so not many things could be checked at once with them. Each file had only one junior officer to whom it's entrusted but then this officer coordinates with his teammates, senior and any other internal and external departments, and organizes everything.
In other words, heavy bureaucracy! And I made the story very simple because many other things come into play (if a teammate has taken his holiday, if a file needs a more experienced officer, or a bilingual officer...)
So 2) file in the queue can mean anything: a. it is there for the first assessment by the junior officer appointed to your case; b. it is in the queue for the intermediary reviews with senior or with the other pending files waiting for additional info; or c. it is in the queue with the files for final checks and approval.
I think for 1) files are immediately assigned to a junior when they come to the department according to load (and, as I theorized before, region). But it could change according to new factors (like redistribution of work load).
... Thank you all for your support and wish you all get your ppr soon...
