So, when is it going to be fixed?

"So, when is it going to be fixed?" Have you ever screamed when someone has said this?

About fifteen years ago the company I was working for had just replaced the biggest application that they used. After a number of months of daily fire fighting the system had begun to stabilize and the number of daily data fixes was down to handful. I came in to work, sat down at my desk and immediately had half a dozen people asking me to help them out. It appears that our application was no longer responding. Literally the eighty percent of the organization that used this application on a daily basis was unable to use the application. Off we went to investigate the problem.

About an hour later, when I was walking down the hallway my boss asked me "So, when is it going to be fixed?" I told her that we didn't know what the problem was so I couldn't tell her. She kept pressing me for a time commitment as to when it would be fixed and I kept telling her that when I knew what the problem was I would know how to fix it and I could then tell her when it would be fixed. She kept pressing me, however, until I finally snapped ... and just walked away.

There is an important lesson here to both management and the people trying to resolve issues. For management, if the people who know the most, don't know what the problem is, they cannot tell you when it will be fixed. It's as simple as that. Come up with an answer that conveys this to your clients because you're going to be using that same phrase a lot throughout your career. For people trying to resolve the issues, if you don't know what the problem is, don't give a time estimate because all you're doing is lying to them and to yourself. Tell them you don't know what the problem is. There is no shame in that. You don't walk into a Doctor's office and expect him to have an answer right away, so why should they expect you to have the answer?