Maker / checker
Hailing from The Netherlands, I have learned to work in environments where "Process management" is a term that comes by often enough. In governmental organizations and larger production organizations it has become normal to hire consultancy agencies to help document the processes. Not that many organisations actually work in a process managed way, it's often a paper exercise to placate management or an external organization. It's limited to the more complex processes and only the activities are documented that are defined across departments. Regular BPM flow charts, sometimes with swimlanes, that's it. In exceptional cases, deliverables are also linked, or risks, or the information layer below the process layer. Those are the more worthwhile exercises. This documentation comprises the business architecture. On the level of processes and activities, it is called the 'administrative organization'.
Within the world of administrative organisation, it's important that work is ordered, and compartmentalized. Within a process step, a clear procedure or instruction is important. Across steps, the handover and alignment of documents and their information. The '4-eyes principle' is used to indicate that not one person should be fully responsible for a part of the business, lest we run the risk that they make a mistake that isn't noticed or defraud the organisation without anyone knowing. By making sure that important functions require 2 people, sometimes more, one person can check another.
For example, ordering expensive office equipment is risky because of possible errors in the acquisition so that money is lost on inefficiency or someone could order a nice printer for the 'home office' just by filling in a different delivery address. So any 'handeling' involving a significant amount of money, significant risk or an important choice should be divided into multiple steps.
The Starreveld standard states that 5 different positions are needed; one for the recquisition, another to sign off on it, another to handle the goods, another to document the goods administration and another to report on the administration (like the inventory and the bank statements). This is the theory, in practice the division is often enough not that strict. Though when it comes to handling the logistics of a militatry organisation with live ordinance involved, it's sometimes even more than 5 functions that are involved.
Administrative organization is a big thing in The Netherlands, a 'Rheinlandic' culture of rules and order. In America, it is known but not as big. Dividing over 2 people is a good starting point, hence the '4-eyes principle'.
The more dangerous the task, the more roles can be added to divide the work over. Take for instance goods handling at an airport. They can be valuable or precious, they go across borders, strict laws apply, and they require good handling and administration so that the transporting agencies can be sure that they are handled correctly during the entire transport. On an airport, people are working to transport goods, to clear the goods at customs, to secure the area of the aiport, and as many different people involved in the administration, taxation and controlling of the process. With a high risk comes the opportunity to spend a lot of money on all these tasks to reduce the risk. The '6-eye principle' so to speak would make sure that no 2 people can commit a fraud, and the '8-eye principle' would make sure no 3 people can collude to commit a fraud, and so on. This does not mean that fraud becomes impossible. It was reported in the Dutch news in 2012 that 20 people were arrested for smuggling drugs through Amsterdam airport. If enough people from different functions can find eachother and cooperate to bypass all the controls, fraud remains possible. The same is the case for dangerous errors. There can never be enough controls to mitigate all kinds of circumstances. The BP oil spill of that same year was a result of so many unfortunate coincidences together that nobody could have seen it coming.
In other parts of the world, this division of functions is often known but looked at in a different manner. Division of roles is a typical 'management principle'. Countries and cultures that are used to working in a very different way will mitigate risks of fraud and error in different ways. In Japan, a senior is always there to double check the work of the junior to find any mistakes that have been made. It almost doubles the workload but definitely lowers the chance of unwanted outcomes. In more dangerous tasks, an even senior person might again check the results that was already checked once. In the Middle-East, I came across a term a lot that I hadn't heard before and that puzzled me for a while until I understood what was really menat by it by the people who use it. It is called the 'maker/checker principle'.
According to this principle, there is a strict division between two functions; someone who creates a product, and someone else who checks it to identify if he can give his approval on the result.
The checker always follows after the maker, and will only check, not change. The checker is a senior of the maker. He can be his manager or a senior in the same position.
Within one process, the maker/checker principle could be applied more than once. Basically, any step of a process can be divided into a maker and a checker step. For instance, a report requested by one department from another might have the principle applied in the request, in the construction of the report, and in the reception of the report. This is more or less the same as in other methods in other parts of the world.
If you are familiar with process flow charts, you could apply the maker/checker division at every 'block', a step in the process. Whatever deliverable is created in one process step, could be checked before presented to the performer of the next step in order to spot discrepancies and correct the work, thereby making sure that the input for every next step is always good or at least good enough according to the rules that are applied during the check. Note that these rules are in practice often not made explicit. Making rules explicit is done in organizations with a high respect for documentation. In organizations and cultures where this is not so, for instance in the Middle-East, the checker could decide differently in similar cases, simply because the first case came by the desk on the morning of the first day of the week and the other in the afternoon of the last day. Personal decisions are acceptable because the decision maker is considered experienced, consistency and replicability is not a vital aspect of decision making.
Working in process management in other parts of the world may therefor not have to be that different. The biggest hurdle when applying the principle for me was to understand that it means the exact same thing across the world and everybody assumes everyone else knows what they mean when they use the term. It is applied the same way everywhere in the world. It is based in the generic 'assessment' task; a decision that needs to be made to decide whether to approve or decline a given input. Approval means the input adheres to the rules that the decision maker applies to assess the input. Declining means it does not adhere to these rules. In the case of the 'maker/checker', the latter outcome would mean that the input is rejected and this is communicated back to the maker so that the work can be improved and presented to the checker again.