If I as a developer have to provide all that information, just let me do it in the first place! 🙂

Fortunately that's how it works here. Our DBAs are the "overseers" of the live environment and are the only ones who can create/drop databases and perform all of the administration tasks. The developers responsible for each of the live databases' projects actually have the rights to modify the database elements and data. Using scripts and the god-send RedGate SqlCompare and SqlDataCompare tools, keeping the production databases up-to-speed with the current configuration is a piece of cake.

I do need to caveat that we're a US gov't organizations with a fairly focused mission area.

Steve