Model Change Management: An Executive Playbook for Safe, Auditable Model Updates

Model updates are routine engineering work until one upgrade misroutes revenue, exposes customer data, or breaks a compliance gate. This episode opens with a concise executive vignette where an uncoordinated model roll‑out cost weeks of remediation and lost margin. Mirko then delivers a non‑technical, decision‑first playbook for Model Change Management: define a release taxonomy (patch, retrain, fine‑tune, replacement), require board‑read change requests with risk scoring, align canary and staged rollout patterns to business exposure, mandate tamper‑evident change logs and rollback criteria, and budget a funded remediation runway. The episode gives a prioritized 30–90 day pilot to operationalize change gates for one high‑impact model, procurement language to capture vendor update obligations, and a communication script for customers and regulators. Leaders leave with concrete artifacts to demand from engineering and procurement and a clear next step: subscribe to DataScience.Show for more executive playbooks. That’s the difference between models and value.

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