Own the Full Lifecycle

Approval is not the finish line

Before release, assign owners for model quality, data, security, incident response, and business decisions. Record approvals and exceptions. In production, monitor quality proxies, delayed outcomes, drift, latency, cost, refusals, safety events, and slice behavior without logging unnecessary sensitive content.

Define rollback triggers and a tested fallback. Maintain an inventory of where each model/version is deployed and which datasets or prompts feed it. Retirement removes traffic, revokes credentials, applies retention policy to logs and artifacts, and preserves only the evidence required for audit.

propose -> risk review -> evaluate -> approve -> deploy
   -> monitor -> incident/rollback -> revalidate -> retire

Scenario: A vulnerable model revision is discovered. An accurate inventory identifies every service using it within minutes; without one, teams search repositories while unknown deployments remain exposed.

Tip: Practice shutdown and rollback before an incident. A rollback plan that depends on missing old weights or an incompatible schema is only documentation, not recovery capability.