The perspective employed by the Middle Office team is an interesting one. Their work paradigm is that of queues running in a first-in, first-out mode. As shown in the picture below, they think of trades as being part of validation and verification queues. When a new trade is booked, it gets pushed into the validation queue from one end. The Middle Office staff attacks the queue from the other end, accepting or rejecting each entry. The ones deemed good get into a second verification queue. The bad ones are returned to the trading desks for modifications in the trade entries or possible cancellations.
A similar paradigm is employed in dealing with market operations such as fixing rates, generating cash flow etc. Market operations have their own two-stage queues. Note that the whole flow is to be facilitated by the trading platform, which should have the capability to render different views. It presents a queue-based view of the data to the middle office staff, and a report-based view to the Market Risk Management team, for instance, or a trade-centric view to most of the other teams. It is important to each team to have a basic grasp and healthy respect for the work paradigm of the other so that they can communicate efficiently with each other. It is no good ignoring the trade perspectives of the rest of the bank. After all, such trade perspectives evolved naturally out of years and years of trial and error.