How do you deal with business units calling direct line and expecting advice dev work to be done on said call with them?

I’ve got a business unit that called me today (internal) expecting me to code while on the phone with them during a conference call…

Then, when I told them I wouldn’t be able to solve it over the phone they asked when they could expect it done by… As if I’m not already beholden to other deliverables. So, I told them I have major deliverables due this week and can’t promise any time towards what they want.

I answer with a stern “no,” and follow with, “I’m not even sure what you’re asking can be done with what we’re running.” I’m not BSing them either. I’m not front end and this isn’t really even front end. They’re basically just trying to embed some chart from one site in a company intranet page. Neither are developed by us, and it’s some weird widget thing with an input for html or something, I dunno. It doesn’t render correctly because of conflicting JS and style sheets, and it’s really not my problem or expertise area.

Anyway, then when they realized I wasn’t going to just drop everything and fix this weird thing, they threw me for another loop. They got the BI kid to roll some excel sheet to pretend it’s a database or something and asked if I could get excel to launch and load the sheet off a shared drive form a link in this same god forsaken intranet page. Wtf?

Now, probably could get something to work but, again, not on the phone and it’s not my wheelhouse. Then they insist I commit to it in two weeks… No! I told them I’m not in a place to commit time to anything that isn’t in my lane and that I’m honestly not sure this whole intranet thing will support it considering the problems with the chart (we do run Kanban and have a reasonably strict policy regarding how projects get prioritized and assigned). It would probably take longer than 2 weeks just to get support for this product on the horn and sort out the whole thing.

Irony, this person is doing all of this to prioritize company projects…

I dunno, how do you all deal with business units calling you direct and practically demanding dev work while they sit on the phone with you? We’re small and there is no good delineation between SRE, SWE, data engineering, IT ops and devops. Basically, since we have to balance IT ops and SRE duties, we run Kanban to avoid major conflicts between deliverables for projects and spontaneous stuff. But our business units make a sport of circumventing the whole process to skip the line and get what they want when they want it.