End of Day: 27th September

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Today has seem to be a slightly strange day in PlusNet towers, with some of our staff participating in the ISPA football tournament.. (we seem to be doing quite well at the last update the Ed saw), although I'm not sure I can put my finger on why it's seemed strange exactly. Maybe that was just me, though. Marketing first, with a combined effort from Phil and Spence. "Today saw the news that we had won another award and Alistair was happy to pick it up on behalf of PlusNet. As well as that, Chris C was at the afore-mentioned football game while the rest of the team concentrated on their day to day work and the preparation for forthcoming products." Finance comes from Mike: "So what’s new in finance today? We have answered 51 tickets leaving the pools empty for the evening. Our new credit card processing software has been rolled live today so there has been lots of checking and monitoring of the billing system. Mark and James have been looking at revenue assurance and preparing for the month end reporting and I have been working with the products department looking at our hardware plans for the future. And after a good night out last night its been strong coffee and headaches all round!!!!" Networks comes from Sarah: "Hi, this is Sarah working in the Network Operations team. Today has been a busy day for problems and at the moment I'm currently investigating one with some emails being incorrectly sent to the webmail spam folder. I've also been helping out here and there on tasks requiring network assistance for our development department working on various P1 problems. For most of the day I've been busy building 4 new caching DNS servers for our new suite in one of our London data centres. We use an automated build environment to build new servers, which helps standardise our builds and ensures we don't forget to install any packages! In between the server builds I've been updating the phone system documentation, which I am currently responsible for and am in the process of handing over to our internal IT support team. Anyway, back to my email problem, bye!" Today’s Development EoD comes from Ali McGowan, who only joined the Development Team last week! As the new boy in town (quite literally - I only started at PlusNet 10 days ago), I've kindly been nominated to write today's end of day! I'm a new project manager, working with the development team. The whole experience at PlusNet has thus far been wholly enjoyable! The people are utterly helpful and co-operative, the work is fast-paced and it really is a buzzing place to work. I got thrown in at the deep end and it's a good job I can swim (well, tread water!). By my third day I had three projects to look after - and by my fifth day, another two. Three of the projects are either in development or to be developed offshore. This brings its own challenges, which I relish - and I thrive on being busy. I spent most of my first week getting up to speed on how the business works, learning about current and future projects, meeting the key players in each department and saying 'Hello' to as many people as I could. I think I've met about 90 people now and can even remember most of their names. From my current workload, the most business critical of my projects is to see through to completion an update to one of our existing products. This will see a number of changes that will strengthen what's on offer and make it more appealing - which can only be a good thing. What I like so far about working at PlusNet is the fast-paced, can-do approach to things. And the free lunch! Seriously though - the atmosphere is very positive and highly collaborative – which means things seem to get done! A week is considered a very long time here - so you've always got to be on your toes. I've already heard people saying things like 'ooh that's a long time in PlusNet years!' and having come from a company where my last project lasted over a year, it's all rather refreshing! Thanks for reading and I look forward to providing another update when I've settled in - and will make sure I've got some anecdotes! Ali McG - Project Manager, ADD Dept. PS: my full name is Alisdair McGowan - but don't ask me to do any impressions as refusal often offends 😄 Today's Web Team update comes from Mark: "Our cutlass wielding manager types have been raiding off-site today, but their absence hasn’t slowed the pace of work, just reduced the amount of piratical banter. (Ed: I think even he's getting sick of the piratical banter now...) Today the team's activities have included: - Improving the House Moves tool - Testing new hardware documentation - Changing support page templates to make updates easier - Investigating problems - Eating lots of sweets - Getting stressed (Ed: So true...) All the while we’ve been keeping an eye on the results of the ISPA Football Tournament. Go Team Go! " Products is brought to you by Shaun: "Testing Halo3 on Xbox360 to ensure correct signatures captured on our traffic management system (which it was!), Forecasting for hardware orders, Further dashboard work, Upgrading customers from dial-up, Various internal project updates" CSC comes from Kelly: "Today in the CSC we have been making sure we have extra resources assigned to cope with any queries arising from our brand consolidation exercise. As I write this, our Call Answer rate is at 80%. Still some time in the day to go, but fingers crossed we aren't doing too badly so far. Top reasons for contacting the CSC today are: Fault checks - Normal fault checks though lots of EU error's - 23% Router Config - No change here. No end of new customers calling up to get started - 21% Brand consolidation - Customers contacting us worried about what they 'had to do' - 19% Faults Updates - Faults updates when a customer has received an SMS message from us - 12% Sales - Lots of sales questions, particularly for customers wanting to move their home phone to us - 10% Other Misc issues 15%" Comms comes from Matt: "Well it sure has been an entertaining day in Comms today. There has been a major change to our systems that has led to a number of issues, meaning that Mand and Chris have been running about to Development and Networks respectively, hardly having time to sit down for 5 mins for a deserved cup of tea. Bob has continued to deal with the various email issues (mainly spam) that have been around recently. James has mainly been provisioning new accounts though is not well, has just moved house and has lost his coffee mug and not been afraid to let us know. I have continued my crusade into the world of problems, and can safely say that I am learning an awful lot. We'll see what tomorrow brings, but if it's more relaxed than today we'll all be very very happy indeed." Phew - the end of a busy day in PlusNet. Now it's time to brave the cold and head home.