Best Practices and Lessons Learned · AI Governance: the course

All courses / AI Governance / Module 5 / Chapter 21

Learning objectives

After the lesson the participant can:

State the governance requirement at each of the six lifecycle stages.
Explain how each of the three tensions is resolved in practice.
Draft a decommissioning record that covers the identities and grants that outlive a model.
Assess a programme against the twelve lessons and the practice checklist, citing evidence for each item.

Key concepts

Six lifecycle stages: Intake, design, build, assure, operate and retire. Where a practice is primarily engineering, the chapter states the governance requirement, which is what a forum or a gate checks, and leaves the method to the platform teams.
Make control fast: The resolution of speed versus control: controls are encoded as pipeline gates, policy as code and golden paths. A team on the golden path never waits for a meeting; lead time from intake to production is measured, and a rising number is a governance defect.
Decommissioning record: A planned retirement with an owner, steps and evidence for each: route traffic to the replacement, disable the service account, revoke tool and database grants, archive model, lineage and evaluation results, retain decision logs, and update the inventory and public register.
Governance and platform consistency: Four practices: one record system with stable identifiers; a machine-checked link from platform thresholds to governance decisions; named platform changes that reopen governance; and one management review pack for both sides.
Practice checklist as code: A machine-readable list in which each item names the stage, the obligation or principle it serves, the evidence that demonstrates it and the chapter that explains it. A pipeline stage evaluates it against the evidence manifest; it is the single statement of what ready means.

Interactive exercises

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

Interactive exercise 1 · Put in order

Six lifecycle stages

Put the lifecycle stages in the order in which a programme meets them, each with the practices the chapter places there.

Interactive exercise 2 · Scenario

A request for something like a chatbot

Apply the chapter's intake practices to a request at Hansa Mutual.

Teaching plan

10 min	Opening: participants place three practices their organisation is proud of on the six lifecycle stages; the teacher notes which stages stay empty, usually retire.
20 min	Teacher presentation of the practices by stage, with Hansa Mutual's motor claims intake record and Nordvik Region's reviewed staff-assistant prompt, then the three tensions and the consistency practices.
25 min	Exercise in groups: score the programme against the twelve lessons with evidence, then write a decommissioning record for one system.
10 min	Group discussion of the practice checklist: which items regulated sectors and public authorities would add to the same file.
10 min	Debrief: each group names the lesson where its evidence was weakest and the first artefact it would create.

Discussion

A retired system that still has a live service account is an unbounded agent waiting for an instruction. What survives in your estate after systems are switched off?
A forum raises an evaluation threshold the platform never receives, or a waiver outlives the configuration it excused. Where have governance and platform decisions drifted apart in your organisation?
Most of the twelve lessons carry over from the Architecture as Code discipline, yet AI programmes forget them more often, under more pressure. Why, and what would make them harder to forget?

Written exercise

Exercise · 25 minutes

Twelve lessons and a decommissioning record

First, take the twelve lessons one by one and state for your own programme whether the steering committee would pass the test, citing one piece of evidence for each yes and one gap for each no. Second, choose a system that should be retired or will be replaced, or use Nordvik Region's travel-allowance claim scorer. Write its decommissioning record: the trigger, the owner, the planned date, six steps each with the evidence that proves it was done, covering traffic, service accounts, tool and database grants, the archive, retained decision logs and the inventory or register, then the archive retention date with its reason and the roles that sign off.

Deliverable: A twelve-row self-assessment with evidence or gap per lesson, and a decommissioning record with six evidenced steps and sign-off roles.

Your work

Self-test

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

What would Nordvik Region's first request, a service desk ticket to switch off the old model, have achieved?
Show the answer
A. It would have stopped traffic and left everything else running
Switching off the model stops traffic only. The decommissioning record the Region now requires also covers the identities and grants that outlive the model, the archive, the retained decision logs and the register update.
How does the chapter resolve the tension between innovation and sovereignty?
Show the answer
C. By keeping sovereignty as a set of architectural options held open, decided per workload
Sovereignty is a set of options kept open, not a refusal to use what is available: per workload, where data may reside, which jurisdictions may reach it, whether weights must be inspectable and what the exit path is.
Which of the following is one of the chapter's twelve lessons?
Show the answer
B. Fund the platform before the fifth pilot
Lesson 2 is to fund the platform before the fifth pilot. The other options invert lessons 1, 8 and 7: architect the system and not the model, generate evidence and do not collect it, and bound autonomy in code and expand it with evidence.