Engineering, production, governance, cost, communication · insight-0305
Keep a decision and assumption log so a model survives handover
- Evidence type
- practitioner heuristic
- Difficulty
- easy
- Roles
- Data scientist, ML engineer, Data analyst, Applied AI
- Industries
- cross-industry
Summary: situation, action, reason, boundary
Situation
A modelling project is handed to a new team, and the reasons for its target definition, exclusions and thresholds exist only in old chat threads.
Action
Maintain a dated log of decisions with context, options considered, evidence, owner and the assumption that would trigger revisiting it; link it from the model card and registry entry.
Reason
Recorded decisions and assumptions make reasoning transferable and reviewable after the authors move on.
Boundary
Long-lived models, regulated systems, cross-team projects, consulting handovers.
Symptom or risk
The new owners undo deliberate choices, repeat rejected experiments, or cannot defend the model in a review.
Exceptions
Small reversible choices do not need entries; log the ones that are expensive to revisit.
Trade-offs
Logging takes discipline; short entries written at decision time are enough.
Pitfalls
Writing the log retrospectively, which records conclusions without the alternatives considered.