Jeff Moden (4/13/2014)

There's a reason why it takes 2 weeks to get something into production. I suspect it's because people need time to test your code. So now YOU stop and think about it... YOU had an error in your code that mixed up the Fiscal Year with the Calendar Year. If YOU had put that into production, you might be looking for a new place to work! 😉

In my company, any changes must go through UAT and then PROD (IST is not rigorously required but is suggested), they are on different domains that are not communicable and require different user id to test and UAT does not have PROD data and we are not allowed to use PROD data in UAT. There is weekly meeting to approve those change request. For database change it involves four departments + at least 5 forms to be created and approved by up to Director.

I hope you can imagine the lengthy process and understand why I think sometimes Option 3 is the one I like to go (and also my manager), reason is very simple, I don't need to go through the bureaucratic and debatable procedures.