i had a similar situation once when we got involved with german auditors.  basically, tech ppl had to hands off the production server.  it is unworkable in my opinion.

we insisted that the director who raised it be the password holder for the initial phase, then sent the occasional out of hours request to him (nothing too obvious).

he then delegated after a week or so, we did the same to his number 2 including a little bit of weekend maintenance (and o/t ), then lo and behold we were the password holders.

from a cya stance, if you are going to be updating data it is actually helpful to have a procedure so someone oversees it and rubberstamps the change.