All excellent info in these responses and I agree with all of them. In our company we have a project request process in place and when our development team needs a backup prior to a change they need to make, we coordinate it through the test servers, test it for a week, and then do the same in the live environment.

Our servers are built by one guy, he hands it over to the team I'm on of DBAs and we maintain it. We do all the ghosting, backups, and patching. The application and development (TSQL) folk send us requests to copy stored procedures between environments etc. It all works very well

I think you should be controlling the backups, and communication between the different departments is key to executing ad-hoc backups successfully and smoothly. Cheers...:P