I think the having the rights discussion is often silly. I was a developer that had rights to very nearly every prod server, and rarely ever used them, and when I did it was usually because we had a down or near down condition and I couldn't find another warm body to help me.

But as long as you follow your documented change control process you should be good. Very likely the process will only handle the deployment to production and not anything about the processes (other than testing) that came before. So you designing and implementing should not be a problem..

CEWII