I have worked in large companies where the change control procedure is beyond ridiculous, it takes up so much time for (as far as I can see) little benefit. The company I work in now is a mid-size firm and while we have formal change control procedures because it is a Canadian company and as such is subject to Canadian Bill 198 auditing requirements it is implemented in a sensible way. Essentially all sign-offs are held in a call system and all code changes in a source control repository. This works very well and seems to me to be a sensible and proportionate implentation of change control for what we do. It enables us to react quickly to problems that arise in the production environment and the ability to implement planned changes on our own timetable, in partnership with the business obviously.