So, it’s September 25th. Exactly 10 years ago today the British Trust SCC car, driven by Andy Green, sets a new world record land speed record of 714.44 mph in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada..

Surely he couldn’t even touch the gaming speeds that some of our customers are seeing on BBYW Pro! Sadly, they don’t really do land speed records in Kbps We’re fairly sure though, no matter how fast Bob’s connection is, he’d still be incredibly slow when it comes to CS: Source.

So, we’re almost halfway through the week and most of the country will already be turning their minds towards Friday, but not at PlusNet, oh no. We continue to plough through our workstack like there’s no tomorrow, or perhaps even reminiscent to Andy Green, ploughing his way through all that sand. So, here follows what we’ve been busying ourselves with for today.

Mandy from Comms had this little insight into our days work.

In the wonderful world of Comms today I have been attending lots of project meetings, and workshops to resolve existing issues on our platform. I’ve also spent some time working on individual customer issues.

Chris has been churning out blog posts and planned maintenance announcements, as well as dealing with Change Control requests from our Networks team.

Bob has been dealing with the recent email changes for some of the customers most affected and working very closely with the guys upstairs in Networks to make sure the process is as efficient as possible.

James has been generally skiving, and talking about his castle. [Ed: All lies. I've actually been spending my time in meetings, in the forums and speaking a fair amount with BT.].

Bill, from Networks says:

As part of the Platform Support team, my official job is to assist developers in making sure that the code is quick, scalable and as secure as possible, whilst following our internal coding standards.

Unofficially, I’m generally found helping out whenever projects need an extra hand, whether it’s coding, testing or supporting problem fixes out-of-hours.

[Geeky bit] This week I’ve been optimising some of the code that’s used on our internal Workplace platform using a combination of vim, xdebug and kcachegrind. Although saving milliseconds on a page request doesn’t sound like much, it all adds up when the system is under load and serving lots of pages concurrently.

CSC time now, with Kelly

In the CSC today we have been busy taking lots of sales calls. We also had a blitz on our cancellation ticket pools, with all teams pitching in to contact customers who were thinking of leaving us, to see if we can help solve any problems for them, and turn them back into happy PlusNet customers.

Top 5 reasons for calling into the CSC today
1) Prov Updates - 20%
Customers calling in to see how their new provide or house move orders are progressing

2) Fault Updates - 20%
Customers calling for an update on an outstanding fault

3) Sales calls - 20%
Lots of enquiries from people considering signing up with PlusNet. Lots of students starting / returning to Uni in particular

4) Hardware Config - 15%
Mainly new customers unable to configure routers, or missing the realm from their user name.

5) Email Issues - 5%
A lot of customers calling in since we have started blocking email from dynamic IP addresses.

Other Misc issues - 20%

Development, today from Cameron:

Hi,

My name is Cameron and I am a Lead Developer. I have just moved back to the main development department from the Web Portal Team.

I am currently working on some new products for one of our main current projects. I recently just worked on the Broadband Your Way Pro project where I was also responsible for the product build. Thanks to some intelligent work from one of our other developers, creating new products in our databases is quite a straight forward process. Using a script that has been used before we can clone/extend that and update it with the new settings (product names, costs, applicable services etc) and it has all the tables that need adding into to set the product up. Then all we have to do is work with Networks to set up the Ellacoya profiles and thats pretty much it (Networks will have other work required such as the connectivity settings etc). Eventually of course we’d like a PMS but in the meantime with our busy dev time this is good stuff and means we are still able to react quickly to business/market needs.

I think the Pro build took about a day or two to create the script and alpha test. I am currently using this method on my current project and today I have cloned the script and am going through adding in the specific requirements of these products. I think in the olden days we had to remember what tables we needed and either create huge lists of sql or create scripts from scratch because each one that was previous was not very adaptable.

Coming back into the department I have noticed that there is still the same buzz and enthusiasm for getting on with the work and there has been a lot of improvements in the development processes so that we have better documentation and support for the work we are doing.

James from Finance proudly says:

It has been a busy day for the finance team and with us being a man, or should I say lady down, there has been plenty to do.
Nicola has been concentrating on cost modeling for products, development and the HR departments.
Mark, Kate and Fiona have been concentrating on tickets and with the finance team closing 141 tickets today (that has to be close to some sort of record) I think it is fair to say they have done a great job! With the other Mark being tied up in meetings for most of the day, I (James) have been covering his queries and getting on with some tax related returns.
And finally ….. it has been Mark’s Birthday today and we have all been eating the chocolates he brought in! Thanks Mark and Happy Birthday!

From Products, Darren, our placement student says that today, Products have mostly been doing:

- Product design review and forecasting
- Home phone refresh
- Testing future hardware
- Clarifying KPI figures, reported data and layout formatting
- Ongoing reporting Dashboard work
- Speaking to hardware manufacturer, ongoing negotiations
- Carbon team updates
- General Daily activities

Chris, from Marketing gave this brief summary:

Another busy day in Marketing today. We’ve been working on a Broadband Your Way Pro email to send to our gaming customers. There’s also been plenty of work preparing for the one portal stuff happening tomorrow.

We’ve been interviewing for a new web designer to join our team and I’ve had the fun job of contacting new signups to BBYW Pro to see which free game they want - and yes there are still some left if you’ve not signed up yet

Well, that would be all from me today. If you’re looking for me, I’ll be racing off into the sunset, doing about 709.44MPH less than Mr. Green managed

Bookmark to:

This entry was posted by James on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 at 5:51 pm and is tagged with and is posted in the category EOD. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a reply below. Pinging is currently not allowed.