Just a question, changes are getting made to the production server directly and then you need those brought down to dev and we're not talking data?

I'd say the process is backwards. You should always be deploying upwards. If you put your database into source control and manage it the same way you do app code, you should be able to rebuild a dev environment at any given moment (minus the data). At least, that's how I helped manage about 15 different development teams.