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The following post was made today by one of the Department Heads in our Development Teams, Jayne Cockill, into our internal forums :

In the second half of 2006, Development made a massive impact on the number of problems in the Development pools. At the beginning of November, around the time the Live Code Support Team (LCST) was created, we branched off 131 problems into a separate pool to be owned by the rest of Development, leaving LCST able to focus on P1s and the newer ‘run-rate’ problems. Development made the commitment to close these 131 ‘backlog’ problems whatever it took.

Well, they’ve done it. It has taken two and a half months, many man-hours and a lot of above-and-beyond dedication from Developers and QA to get these closed.

This backlog contained some of the oldest, nastiest problems and very few were easy to fix, but we are now free of their burden. This frees Developers and QA to now focus fully on projects and to assist LCST with newer problems.

I’d like to thank everyone that has been involved in this process. I for one truly understand the effort that it has taken to get to this crucial point. I do, however, also believe that we have all learned some valuable lessons as a result, let’s just ensure that we keep learning and continue to demonstrate Cornerstones to ensure that we don’t ever allow ourselves to fall back into old ways.

Well done guys!

Regards,
Jayne.

On Monday, I will be providing some more stats on our progress with problems in general.

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On Wednesday, Carol Axe, Head of CSC made available a presentation with the results of December’s Customer Support Quality Feedback Survey on the PlusNet Usergroup website.

This survey is sent to a proportion of customers who generated inbound contacts to our CSC in December last year.

You can view the results here. As you can see, in the last few months we have made a lot of progress in the Support Centre and we’re continuing to make improvements going forwards. Please do let us know if you have any feedback - as ever.

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Yesterday saw a long awaited return to ADSLGuide, following improvements in moderation and a general improvement in our services and CSC response times. Whilst we have initially started our external forum campaign in ADSLGuide, we’re now paying more focus to other places like ISPReview, WebUser, and so on.

The re-entry post can be found here.

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Heads up…

Today, we’ve updated our About Us page here with information about exactly what we do (and don’t!) do. Why not have a read?

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Today, Phil Webb, Director (designate) of Network Services made the following post in our internal Announcements forum :

I have seen from the results of Dean’s 1-2-1 that fixing e-mail is mentioned many times and number of people think that fixing e-mail is his responsibility, well it’s not it’s mine.

I know how much ***** that e-mail has caused everyone across the business in the last 12 months, and thought it would be useful to let everyone know where it was, where we are right now and what is planned to improve it further.

Where we were….

Around this time last year there was a sever lack of storage and the platform was running at capacity. So we bought some new storage which caused us months and months of grief. We’d also stopped managing the users on the platform so things we getting worse.

Where we are now…..

We’ve started managing the platform again by archiving mail older than 90 days old and archiving and black-holing mailboxes that have not been accessed for 180 days.

We’ve also added around 1Tb of additional capacity to the netapps which means we’ve got headroom at the moment.

What is coming to further improve things……

We have another 2Tb of storage ready to add to the netapps as soon as we have fully planned it.

We are looking at options to increase the processing power of the netapps.

We are about to start moving the remaining mail from the Sun storage.

We are trialing various commercial spam detection solutions that have a 99.999% accuracy which comes in at around 1 false positive per 1,000,000 messages.

We are going to complete the rollout of the new MX Cores which increases the capacity of mail we can process by around 70%.

We are looking at implementing spam detection on the outbound relays to stop us being blacklisted so often.

We are looking at the function of the MX lasts so that they have similar protection to the MX Cores.

Scripts are being developed so that the CSC can do many of the things that require Net Ops at the moment and means there is less risk of error in future.

There is development underway to change the default mailbox so that it does not receive messages unless they are directed to a known address

The bottom line on all of this is that we’ve had a ***** time on mail, and we’ve significantly improved things so that it is not causing us all too much pain, but we still have many more things coming to further improve the reliability and functionality of the platform so that it causes us no pain at all and we have an e-mail platform we can be proud of.

Phil

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I guess if you’re reading this, then you’re more than likely to have already signed up! But, in the next couple of weeks we’ll be launching the first phase of our Signup improvements project which boasts a much cleaner interface - and gets rid of that annoying Popup!

Initially this will be rolled out only to Plusnet, Force9 and Free-Online customers - moving onto Metronet next (following the Direct Debit rollout for Metronet customers!).

Here are some initial prototypes of the process. I reckon the whole thing looks a lot better! Additionally, we’ll be improving the final confirmation page of the signup process (to better inform customers what will happen next) and we’ll be tweaking the E-Mails that are sent out to customers as orders progress.

Residential Signup 1
Residential Signup 2
Residential Signup 3
Business Signup 1 (Similar process, but different style)

This phase will only change the look, feel and framework of the signup process - it won’t actually change the questions asked. Following this, however, we’ll be looking at further ’streamlining’ the process. Going forwards we’ll be looking at a number of improvements to the questions we’re asking - and the order in which we do. We’re all up for your feedback if you have any (and we’ll also be working with PUG).

We want to make the whole customer experience a whole lot better from the minute you decide to become one.

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Time for me to introduce myself, although some of the PlusNet Community probably already knows me from my time Moderating the Portal Forums and from my involvement firstly in Usertools and then with the PlusNet Usergroup.

I’m the newest member to the Web Portal Team (Tam has been here a day longer than me!) and am tasked with working on ‘Rapid Projects’ while Cam helps and concentrates on bigger projects and Tam works on usability issues and other projects.

So, what have I been doing so far? ‘Portal Pete’ has kept me busy since I started with getting more and more graphs on the portal, so that the customers and the world at large can see some of the same reporting that we do internally (here although they haven’t all been my doing). I’ve also assisted in getting the Real-Time Call Statistics back on the portal (Call Stats) so that the customers can see exactly how the call centre is performing.

This has actually been a useful experience, as it’s allowed me to get to grips with both the PlusNet Codebase, the QA Procedure and all the Rollout procedures… an often arduous task, particularly the first time you do it!

My current ‘big’ project which has taken my time recently has been re-skining the Just-The-Name (JTN) website, one of the Parbin brand’s that PlusNet acquired when they purchased Metronet. Hopefully, by the time this entry goes live, we should have had our meeting to discuss the actual rolling live of this. This project has, probably, caused me more trouble than doing the setup for the rollout procedure for the portal - as there is no documentation of the way JTN works and how it’s set up, I am sure I must have been annoying Baz and some of the Networks Team with all the Ad-Hoc tasks to get the information I needed!

Concurrently with the JTN Reskining, I’ve been looking at my first piece of major work for the portal. Instead of the Ad-Hoc tasks for the graphs, I’ve actually involved in a piece of cross-functional and cross-departmental work, as part of the ‘PlusNet Transparency’ serious of projects… this is to put our P1s (Priority) problems on the portal. This has involved me writing a PDD and participating in the discussions regarding the DDD that our BA has written. I hope this will give customers an insight in to the way PlusNet works, and it is certainly something that I (wearing a customer hat) would like to see. I can also see the comments from certain customers after we roll this live…. “Well, what about the other problems you raise… when are we going to see them?”

I’m not sure what I’ll be up to after I’ve done the ‘P1s on the Portal’ project… but I think that’s enough to be getting on with just now!

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Morning all,

One of the new features our Web Portal team are currently working on is titled “P1s on the Portal”. The aim of this project is to directly represent all customer affecting Priority 1 Problems on an area of our Portal. This is mentioned in our “Plans for 2007″ document, here.

One of the benefits of this area is that the problems will appear and be updated in ‘real-time’, and anyone will be able to view comments directly from the engineers or developers that are working on the fix / investigation / testing etc….
Portal pages will be automatically and dynamically updated as our internal Problem Tool is used and updated.

Here are some basic Prototypes that we’re currently working on :
Current Priority Problems
Problem Details Page
Problem Archive

You’ll notice that you will also have the ability to highlight when a particular problem is affecting you - and register your username against it. Internally we will be able to view all the usernames from customers affected which can help with our investigations.

We expect this to be the first phase of getting all our internal problems (we have P2’s and P3’s too!) onto the Portal and searchable at the click of a button - but we have to start somewhere! So P1’s, initially, it is!

There is no date available for rollout yet, but we’re probably looking at the far-end of Q1.

Any feedback / comments?

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We are pleased to announce that this morning, at 7am, BT announced to the London Stock Exchange that they had sucessfully completed their acquisition of PlusNet PLC.

We have produced a page on our website so that you can see confirmation of the takeover, as well as our plans for 2007.

Click here to view our Plans for 2007

Please keep all discussion surrounding the takeover and our Plans for 2007 to this thread, on our Portal Forums. We’ll be there all day to answer your questions and comments.

Thanks

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At this moment in time, we have 0 open problems with our Network Services team, 0 tickets awaiting Networks actions and 0 Red alerts in our Nagios Network Monitoring System.

Great stuff!

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