We would like to say congrats to Paul Jenkins, winner of the “PlusNet Prize for Outstanding Achievement on an Internet-Based Project as Part of a Computing Course award” at Leeds Metropolitan University. (Take a breath after reading that title!)
Paul, who graduated from the University this year, won the PlusNet sponsored award for his innovative CMS solution. Based on object-orientated PHP5 and Ajax, it is flexible, fully customisable and fully compliant with the Disability Discrimination Act. It can be customised to any specific industry and the system also actively optimises pages and content for SEO success. You can see an example in action at SchoolWebsiteBuilder.
Whilst building a website for St Matthews School in Leeds, Paul saw an opportunity and ran with it. His CMS has grown from there.
On winning the award, Paul commented: “Thank you for giving me the award. I am very grateful for winning this and hope to take the product to market very soon.”
Since graduating, Paul, who is 21 years old, from Middlesborough, has setup his own Computer Services Company, Nurvex Media . Don’t forget, Paul, this ones perfect for you 
Chris
Here at PlusNet we have a number of websites (brands) that have historically been used to bring tailored offers to different groups of our customers.
The present list of these is as follows:
PlusNet
Plus.net.uk
Force9
Free-Online
Metronet
As we have grown the differences between many of these brands has been reduced (PlusNet, Free-Online and Force9 now offer identical services, from nearly identical websites). Some of our offers have become very dated or have been replaced by a service from another brand (Plus.net.uk is an example of this).
With the recent introduction of the community site we have taken the decision to work towards a single portal for all our customers. The first step of this will be phasing out the Force9, Free-Online and Plus.net.uk portals, as the content on these is essentially the same as PlusNet.
Having five websites has meant releasing new services or projects involves five lots of work, essentially duplicating the design and build effort for each of the different brands. By changing this we can become more agile and improve the timescales for delivery of every project we work on. As a result will be able to offer more services to all of our customers more quickly. A prime example of this is Wi-Fi access (from BT Openzone hotspots at airports, libraries etc), which was only ever made available to PlusNet customers due to the complications of building separate versions. Going forwards this will not be an issue because having one portal will mean we only need to build one version of each new system or product. .
An FAQ for the upcoming changes is published below. We hope that we will address any questions or concerns you have, and it will be updated with any additional questions raised. If you do wish to discuss this further please comment below or visit our forums here.
Regards
Mand
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Will I be able to use my existing login details?
Yes. When you log in to the new portal, you will see a drop-down menu. You simply need to choose which ISP you are a customer of (Force9, Free-Online, Plus.Net etc), If you have cookies enabled, your choice will be remembered the next time you login.
2. What if someone else has the same username as me?
It is not possible for someone else to have both the same username as you and be a customer of the same brand.
3. Will I see all the same information?
Yes, the portals are very similar to each other and the content will be the same as are available to you now.
Provided you have logged in the content in the Help Assistant will be tailored to your particular brand (this will be done via cookies, so if you have cookies disabled for our site you will need to make the choice every time you visit, otherwise all information will default to PlusNet).
4. Will my account change?
No, there will be no changes to your product. This project is simply about changing our website to make it easier for us to offer you more. The web address you use to login and the way you log in are the only things that will change.
5. Do I need to change any of my settings?
No, all your existing settings remain as they are now.
6. Why are you making these changes?
As the portals are almost the same, the cost of maintaining them (in terms of development and content resource time) far outweighs the benefit of having all five portals available. We feel that by making the changes now we can improve the service for all customers. We will be able to make more improvements in a shorter timescale as a result. With the recent introduction of the Community site it also reduces the number of sites you will need to visit in order to keep up to date with happenings here at PlusNet.
7. Is this the end of the non-PlusNet brands?
No, although you will be logging into the PlusNet portal you will continue to be a customer of whichever brand you signed up to. For new signups, the only options for will be PlusNet or Metronet, but that isn’t to say that we won’t choose to rebrand F9 or Free-online in the future if there is a good reason to do so.
8. I’m a Metronet customer, how will I be affected?
There are no changes to Metronet at this point, we are currently discussing options internally, and will shortly be communicating the plans for Metronet. We want to make it possible for all Metronet customers to easily benefit from PlusNet products and features, but at the same time we know many Metronet customers like the simpler products on offer, and we have no desire to change that.
9. I have referral banners pointing to Force9/Free-Online, do I have to change these?
No, these will continue to work as normal, but any people you refer will need to signup for a PlusNet account.
10. I have made posts on the portal forums for my brand, will these be lost?
No, we are currently working on a project to merge old posts from the portal forums to the forums on the Community site, so you will still have access to older posts from all the forums.
11. I am a Plus.net.uk customer, how will I be affected?
You will also be asked to login to the main PlusNet website upon completion of this project. Your account is linked to the Force9 brand, and will be dealt with as such (due to your username and email address using Force9 this makes the most sense). You will also be able to take advantage of the new Webmail service recently introduced for Force9, Free-Online and PlusNet customers. You can see a guide for this here.
12. Will my account emails now be sent from PlusNet?
Your billing and general account emails (regarding faults, usage allowances etc) will still be addressed from your brand (Force9 Support, Free-Online Support etc), however you may receive newsletters and marketing emails from PlusNet, or other one-off emails as and when the need arises.
13. When will the changes be made?
You can log in to both your usual portal and the PlusNet portal now.
From September 26th you will need to log in to the PlusNet portal only.
We’ve not publicly talked about this before (not for any other reason that the fact I’ve been so busy with it), but in the last two months PlusNet has signed deals with two companies in India to provide a remote software development team to supplement the existing team in Sheffield.
We’ve done this for various reasons:
1. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to recruit high quality technical staff in the South Yorkshire area of the UK.
2. Since the BT acquisition of PlusNet we have a real need to ramp up software development capacity with immediate effect.
3. If done correctly, it’s a high quality and cost effective solution.
4. We can ramp up capacity much quicker by taking this route than recruiting into our Sheffield office.
5. By reducing the pressure on our UK software development team, we can get to a position where we give the UK guys some “personal time” during the week to work on their own projects and inject some more entrepreneurial spirit into the business. (after all, PlusNet as we see it today was born out of this type of approach; I’ll tell that story one day…)
‘Outsourcing to India’ carries with it many negative connotations. “you should be investing in the UK”, “oh, it’ll all go wrong”, “I’ve heard all sorts of horror stories about that”.
Well, having successfully done this before outside of PlusNet, I’m of the opinion that this is a good thing for PlusNet and something we should embrace.
In May of this year I went over to India and interviewed several software development companies, whittling the list down to two successful businesses I was comfortable working with. We are now well under way on two projects, with the first one due for delivery in the next few weeks.
To make this work on a day to day basis you need to be prepared to invest a lot of time and energy into the communication process between the two businesses. India is 4.5 or 5.5 hours ahead of the UK (depending on the time of year), so there’s a narrow window when both parties are in the office together. This means you must make full use of this. All team members in both locations have each other’s Instant Messenger details, so questions can be raised and answered in real time. The projects are managed centrally and with full visibility to both parties using “Trac”, an enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects. You can read more about Trac (and even download it and play with it yourself), here: http://trac.edgewall.org/
We will always keep our core team of software developers in our Sheffield office. Certain projects that we undertake require us to take an ultra-agile approach to a project. To retain this approach you need to have the full project team in the same room in front of the whiteboard sketching out solutions, then going straight back to the desk and cracking on with it. For longer projects that require a detailed level of functional analysis, then the remote development team approach works out well.
I understand that talk like this can quite easily lead to fear of “it might be the software developers today, but I bet it’s the call-centre that goes to India next”, but let me make this quite clear; PlusNet has always been and always will be a Sheffield based business; I expect that’s quite clear if you have talked to one of our Customer Service guys and girls over the years. The founders of this business were local people, the current CEO, CTO and Customer Services Director are dyed-in-the-wool Sheffield Wednesday fans, and the rest of the management team includes a good deal of local people. We are firmly of the belief that it makes no sense to “outsource” the core competencies of our business. If it makes sense to look outside and partner with another supplier or provider then we will, but the thinking, the decision making and the direction will always come from our Sheffield HQ.
It’s all very interesting stuff and represents a really exciting new chapter in PlusNet’s history. I’m happy to answer any questions anyone may have on this topic; put something in the forums or send me a private message and I’ll be glad to respond.
Matt Grest
Head of Future Development
PlusNet
As I am involved as one of the members of the Scrum I should be able to let you know how Scrum works from my perspective. This first blog is simply an overview of Scrum and how it works from a slightly different angle to the blog by Pete. I’ll post up my experiences of Scrum in a follow up blog shortly.
Hopefully I’ll be able to explain the title and what Scrum is to you.
Ok then, so what is Scrum? Wikipedia defines it as “a method for managing work, improving morale, and achieving very high productivity. A popular agile software development method for project management, Scrum is noted for its simplicity, its high level of transparency, and a team based approach to work.”
So quite similar to how a lot of projects are run then? Well.. yes and no.
Normally we get a project to deliver something and decide on how it’s going to be delivered; this is often done in a staged approach delivered in phases. During the course of each phase there are often items which get added and therefore the timescale gets pushed further back. With Scrum any new features are added to a product backlog to be delivered in a later phase, meaning that the current set of deliverables should still go live within the life of the first sprint.
So what are we going to use Scrum on? The first item we will trialling this method of project management on is the Manage My Mail tool. We are looking to redesign this to make it easier and more intuitive to use while still offering the functionality to make it useful.
The Product Owner works with the business to determine what features need to be delivered; he maintains this prioritised list as his product backlog. Once the backlog has been decided it is then time for the first planning meeting, typically for Scrum these can be up to 4 hours. Only pigs are allowed to be present during the planning stages of the Scrum, chickens have to stay clear!
Chickens, pigs?? Are you sure you haven’t gone mad? Well maybe I have, but chickens and pigs are integral to the working of Scrum. For those of you still reading here are the roles and rules of Scrum:-
Product Owner: The product owner is responsible for the backlog and prioritising the tasks on there
The Team: these are the people responsible for delivering the project during the course of the sprints, the team decide on what can be delivered during each sprint
The ScrumMaster: responsible for implementing Scrum, making sure everyone follows the rules
The three above roles are the pigs, these are the committed roles.
If you’re not a pig, then you are by definition a chicken - someone who is involved but does not have tasks.
Even though chickens may be interested in the project they are not allowed to interfere, it’s the job of the ScrumMaster to ensure this goes as it should.
Right, we know the project, the roles, the backlog has been determined and we’ve had the first planning meeting to decide on what we will deliver in the first sprint. Hmm, so what’s a sprint? I’m glad you asked, a sprint is a defined period, 30 days in this instance, to deliver a functional set of tasks. Once the deliverables have been decided for the first sprint, these cannot be changed; any new tasks that crop up will be added to the backlog for a future sprint.
Once the tasks for the sprint have been decided the next step is decide which members of the team are doing which tasks. It’s the teams decision how many of the prioritised tasks they can complete during the sprint.
On we go with the Scrum, I’ll do an update post partway through the sprint to keep you informed.
Chris
The purpose of the Customer Feedback Survey is to facilitate a better understanding of what our customers think of the service they receive from the Customer Support Centre (CSC).
Customer feedback will be utilised to identify areas for improvement within the department, and also provide a feedback mechanism on the performance of individual agents.
9627 surveys have been submitted (via email) to PlusNet customers that have called the CSC. 1.6% of the surveys were completed which represents a sample size of 0.5% of all customers that have had telephone contact with a CSC agent in the month of July.
It is important to highlight these statistics in order to allow the data presented within this report to be taken in context. Although the results gathered from the survey are a random sample of customers that have spoken to a CSC agent, the results do represent a very small sample of the total calls handled within the CSC during the month.
The graphs below represent a selection of the questions asked to the customers to demonstrate the differing types of feedback we receive each month.
The first graph is to show the different types of queries we receive into the CSC. As you can see technical calls are the main category these fall into, however in June and July we receive a jump in the faults calls in. This is very likely due to the poor weather causing an increase in connection problems.
The next graph is to show the call answer speed in the support centre. Due to the increased amount of faults calls, which tend to take longer than a generic email or sales query, this figure has slipped.
As you can see there has been a marked increase in the number of calls taking over 10 minutes to answer. We have increased the number of agents on the phones to try to rectify this and are still recruiting for more CSC staff in order to continue to drive this back down. When there is an extended wait time there should be a message placed on the telephone menu system to advise customers of this, as you can see the number of customers saying this message was present has increased, however there are still too many saying ‘no’. We need to make sure that this message is as clear as possible.
When a customer calls through regarding an account query, we have to verify that they are who they say. In order to do this we perform varying data protection checks; this is usually in the form of password confirmation.
From the graph it can be seen that over 90% of customers each month state that a DPA check is taking place, the remaining percentage could be for a number of reasons. The customers may not be realising that asking for the last 2 letters on a password is a data protection check. Training is continuous in the CSC to ensure that every customer that has an account specific query is asked a DPA question.
The percentage of customers happy with the resolution offered by the agent on a call is at 70.7% this month, this is an improvement on 70.1% last month. We can and will continue to improve this figure by continued training and peer review of agents skill levels.
Resolving issues as early as possible is one of the areas we regularly assess and try to improve, we are aiming to get each ticket or call resolved on the first touch whereever possible. The graph shows that 60.5% of customers queries are resolved on the first call in. This has previously been up to 73.4% in May but has dropped recently due to the increase in fault calls which tend to take longer to resolve due to the very nature of them. When a fault ticket is raised we try to contact the customer whenever we have further information via SMS or telephone call so they do not need to call back in.
As can be seen from the graph, the percentage of customers ranging from fairly-extremely satisfied has remained above 70% again. This has dropped by around 3% from the previous month but is still consistently high. The focus in the CSC remains on first time fix, quality of responses and call resolution.
I hope this blog has given a good account of how we take on board feedback, I look forward to showing you all the improvements next month.
Chris.
The PlusNet Community Site Blogs have plenty of reading for the weekend.
There have also been posts this week about OpenCoffee Sheffield II by Kelly, and an insight into Dean and Matt’s trip to India, where we find out that Globalisation is really happening. Finally, Matt Taylor’s regular update from the CSC describes the top issues last week, and as ever is worth a read.
Enjoy!
Ian
This post was originally written to coincide with the launch of our new Broadband Your Way products. Unfortunately other events took over at the time and it never quite made it out back then. The background remains useful however, and for those interested in our Broadband product strategy and the design of BBYW this will be worth reading. This blog article is the first in a series which will discuss what is changing about broadband supply over the coming years and how those changes at wholesale level will impact our customers and consumers generally.
You may have read about some ISPs having concerns about the BBC’s iPlayer. We spoke last month about how we had prepared for the iPlayer and that our traffic management systems were ready and detecting it correctly.
At the moment the iPlayer is still in a beta trial and signups are being controlled by the BBC but when it comes out of beta it has the potential to be pretty big.
Right now people can download BBC TV shows via P2P or other methods, but it’s not always easy, there are legality issues and also trust issues in that you don’t know what you are downloading and whether or not it contains a virus.
Services like iTunes have proven that there is a demand for “legitimate content”, and the iPlayer comes from a very trusted source in the BBC. As such I can see a lot of people who today would be considered very light users who probably wouldn’t go near P2P being interested in the iPlayer.
I don’t expect a sudden overnight rush to switch to the iPlayer, people are still going to watch their televisions and record shows on VCRs or Sky Plus or similar but I can see the main usage being from people that have forgotten to watch or record the show the show they want to watch. More…
A report released by uSwitch today has highlighted the rising cost of technical support for broadband users in the UK. Consumers spend over £34 million per year calling broadband helplines, on top of the £2.8 billion spent on their broadband service.
The worst offenders appear to be Orange with their ’starter’ customers paying up to £22 to resolve a single issue, with call costs of 50p per minute. More…
When we, as developers, are asked to deliver a new website tool or piece of functionality we generally have a deadline and a brief. How you hit both the brief and the deadline comes down to Project Management of one sort or another.
Over the past fortnight here at PlusNet Towers, we’ve been trialling a (new for us) development methodology known as ‘Scrum‘. Developed and championed originally in the mid 90’s by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, Scrum promises a simple process to manage complex projects. It has been implemented in many organisations over the years and is recognised widely in the software (and other) industries.
Traditional Project Management would tend towards being prescriptive in that the project ‘owner’ lays out what he wants to see delivered, and by when. The resources (staff) have to organise their schedule to accommodate these demands. If something doesn’t go right, the brief is added to, or the resources have to work on many other items, the project deliver date would slip.
Scrum takes a different tack and sets out with a mind to deliver priority functionality in regular batches (sprints). The delivery team meets with the ‘product owner’ and commits to deliver what it sees as being a realistic goal within a defined period – the sprint. In Scrum, the deadline would never slip, but perhaps the amount of functionality might be changed, with any outstanding items carried over to the next sprint. It’s an important difference to conventional project management and places a lot of trust in the delivery team.
In our trial we’re taking a look at our Manage My Mail tool. We’ve identified a number of improvements we should make from a usability perspective that should make the application easier to use for our customers. I’m the ScrumMaster for this; my role is to facilitate the process and make sure everyone follows the rules that keep the work focused and free from interference. The team itself includes Chris from our Comms team and I know he’ll shortly be posting more information about Scrum and how it works – and what it feels like to be involved in the process.
We have a saying here at PlusNet.. ‘It’s all about Delivery’. I like to think of that as ‘if it’s not live it’s not doing anyone any good’ - perhaps Scrum will prove to be a useful tool to help us keep delivering the tools you need and find useful.
Pete
Here at Plusnet we're always trying to use clever open source things to make our lives easier. Sometimes we write our own and make other people's lives easier too!
We sell broadband, phone, VoIP and more to homes and businesses in the UK. Winner of 9 out of 11 Categories in the 2008 USwitch survey. Winner of "Best Consumer ISP" at 2008 ISPA awards. Voted number 1 in the Broadband Choices 2008 survey.
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