Having worked for very large enterprise corporations, I expected the effort to gain access to the environments to be quite difficult, but its still frustrating.
I've been brought in with the task of performance tuning post migration from Sybase to SQL Server 2008. The migration will continue on through the time my contract is up. Two weeks in and I'm not sure what the environments look like. Their UAT environment is an exact copy of production according to the database team.
The team seems to be quite competent and very willing to help.
First lesson, patience. More to come once I dig into it.