Management as Code for AI Programmes

All courses / AI Governance / Module 4 / Chapter 16

Learning objectives

After the lesson the participant can:

• Explain why an AI portfolio cannot be managed with budgets, milestones and status colours alone.
• Write a value hypothesis with a baseline, a target, acceptance criteria and retirement criteria.
• Distinguish measured from self-reported benefit and leading from lagging indicators.
• Design a report to the management body that separates what the pipeline measured from what a person judged.

Key concepts

Portfolio register

A directory of files, one per use case, validated in a pipeline. Intake is a pull request and the merge is the approval. One register serves governance, funding and regulatory reporting.

Falsifiable value hypothesis

A statement of expected value with a baseline and a target, which makes it falsifiable and therefore manageable. Its metrics are produced in production and compared with the baseline automatically, so the register shows whether the hypothesis is currently supported.

Lifecycle states

A closed vocabulary: proposed, discovery, pilot, scaling, operating, retired. The pipeline enforces transitions against evidence; a steering committee may move a use case without it only by recording an exception with an owner and an expiry date.

Evidence-gated tranches

The platform is funded centrally as a product; use cases are funded in tranches by the business units that own them, each released against evidence such as confirmed data access, an approved AI Decision Record or acceptance criteria met.

Report as a projection

A board or supervisory report generated by the pipeline from the register and stamped with the commit it came from, so that anyone who questions a figure can recompute it. A group projects the same register into one report per entity.

Interactive exercises

Do them here and get feedback at once. Choose a card and then where it belongs, or drag it.

Teaching plan

Discussion

1. Retirement criteria are written at intake, when nobody is yet attached to the system. Which system in your portfolio would have been retired by criteria written on its first day?
2. A key result such as deploying twenty AI use cases by year end rewards counting. What outcome and what constraint would you pair for your own programme?
3. The committee reviews what was reported; it does not decide whether to report. Why does the chapter separate the obligation fixed in law from management discretion in this way?

Written exercise

Self-test

Choose an answer to see whether it is right, or open the answer below each question.

1. What happens when Hansa Mutual's portfolio exception EXC-2026-012 reaches its expiry date without its closure condition being met?

   1. The exception is renewed automatically for a further 90 days
   2. The use case stays in scaling and the board is informed at its next meeting
   3. The use case reverts to its previous state unless the exception is closed
   4. The use case is retired and its budget returned to the platform
   Show the answer

   C. The use case reverts to its previous state unless the exception is closed
   The on_expiry field is set to revert the state unless closed. A lapsed exception reverts the use case and does not silently become permanent, which keeps management discretion without losing accountability.

2. In Nordvik Region's benefit realisation record for the staff assistant, how is the self-reported figure of hours saved per week treated?

   1. It is kept, classified as an estimate, and excluded from the benefit figure
   2. It is averaged with the measured drafting time to give the benefit
   3. It is deleted, because survey data may not be stored in the register
   4. It is used as the main benefit, since it covers all tasks
   Show the answer

   A. It is kept, classified as an estimate, and excluded from the benefit figure
   Surveys overstate the time assistants save, so the chapter prefers measured to self-reported benefit. The survey figure is kept but not used in the benefit figure, the distinction a public auditor will ask about.

3. Who pays for evaluation and assurance in the chapter's funding model, and why?

   1. Each use case, so that costs fall where the risk is created
   2. The risk function, so that assurance stays independent of delivery
   3. The supplier, as a condition of the model-supply contract
   4. The platform, so that nobody saves money by testing less
   Show the answer

   D. The platform, so that nobody saves money by testing less
   Evaluation and assurance are paid by the platform so that nobody saves money by testing less, while exit is paid by the use case through a provision set at intake.