Why not work with him to build an automated deployment system? Get the group to think a bit bigger - consider deployment (and possible rollback) a function tha

Why not work with him to build an automated deployment system? Get the group to think a bit bigger - consider deployment (and possible rollback) a function that is an integral part of the overall system. Get the sysadmin working on system stuff and automated provisioning tools so environments can be replicated and performance tools, monitoring, etc - and have the developers understand that they are building something that has to be deployed by this tool. The decision as to who gets to push the "go" button is one the group can make - maybe it needs signoff by the sysadmin, maybe it can be overridden with a warning if necessary - etc. These days it's cheap, especially in linux land, to manage and deploy proper development, testing, and production servers with automated tools -and time is better invested generally in working on those tools than manually provisioning things. It's a bit more work at first, but pays off hugely farly quickly.