Checklist: Change, Retirement and Audit
Classifying change honestly, retiring without losing the ability to answer questions, and a dry run that finds the gaps before someone else does.
Change is where governance quality is really tested: the classification determines the assurance, and the assurance determines whether the authorization still means anything.
The audit-readiness dry run at the end takes half a day and reliably finds three things. Run it before you are asked to.
A completed checklist is not evidence. The evidence is the record it told you to complete — the templates hold those.
Classifying the change
- Change described in the terms the authorized configuration uses System Owner
- Dimensions touched identified before the assurance scope is chosen Risk Lead
- Classified against the change-type table, with reasoning, not just a label System Owner
- Autonomy change answered explicitly — any increase is never cosmetic System Owner
- Second person confirms at Tier 3–4 where cosmetic or minor is claimed Risk Lead
- Supplier-initiated changes recorded as changes even when nothing local moved System Owner
- Population or user-group change treated as Major Risk Lead
Delta assurance
- Scope states what is re-run and what is not, with the reason for each
- Neither “full re-run” nor “no re-run” accepted as a default
- Criteria unchanged from the original evaluation, so results are comparable
- Rollback plan stated, with its duration
- Post-change verification defined, with a date
- Authorized configuration updated on completion — the most commonly skipped step
Retirement
- Downstream consumers identified from telemetry, not documentation Architect
- Data disposition confirmed, including indexes, embeddings, caches and evaluation sets Data Owner
- Machine identities revoked Security Architect
- Model weights, prompts and configurations disposed of or archived deliberately System Owner
- Evidence archived and one retrieval tested in a readable format System Owner
- Ability to explain historical decisions preserved for the liability window Risk Lead
- Residual obligations identified and assigned to a named owner Risk Lead
- Knowledge preservation note written, including what would be done differently System Owner
Audit-readiness dry run — half a day, once a quarter
- Pick one Tier 3–4 system and one decision it made six months ago
- Reconstruct which model version, instruction version and grounding sources were live that day
- Produce the authorization record in force at the time, with its conditions
- Produce the classification in force, and its countersignature
- Produce the assurance evidence the authorization relied on, at the right version
- Show what the system was permitted to do, and evidence that it stayed within it
- Show what changed since, and how each change was classified and assured
- Show the oversight evidence: who reviewed, how often they departed from the recommendation
- Time the exercise, and record what could not be produced
After the dry run
- Gaps recorded as findings with owners and dates, not as observations
- Anything that took more than an hour to produce is a tooling or record-design problem
- Records that could not be produced at all are escalated to the AI Governance Body
- One improvement implemented before the next dry run