It’s been an exciting day at PlusNet today. We’ve been awarded “Best Broadband Provider” by the Computer Shopper magazine and everyone has been toiling away in their daily roles. One of our developers even became a Dad for the first time!

Jen from Finance is first:

Another busy day has passed. We are still a person down due to it being the ‘flu season, although the team still managed to close 170 tickets between us.

James has been working on the balance sheet reconsolidation, and I’ve been working on the domain name renewals.

Most importantly though… Nikki has been putting any final touches to ‘In the Pink’ day tomorrow. I hope you all have your pink clothing ready!!

Now, Colin in the Portal Team:

Today in the Web Team we have been continuing to investigate problems so that we can ascertain who needs to work on them and start pushing them through the development cycle. We’ve also continued working on some internal development and some forthcoming projects.

Products, from Darren:

Products seemed a little empty this morning as two people were working from home. But the emptiness didn’t last long when Dave Tomlinson found his new seating home here with the Products team.

Me: Today is Thursday and that only means one thing!! Max DSL upgrades, upgrading our customers to the wonders of upto 8Mb speeds. I have continued preparations for Halloween and we have an even bigger budget than I thought, its time to go decoration crazy. Today I have also done the forecasting for our homephone product.

Ian: Traffic management, planning improvements to the BBYW speed descriptions, looking at speed analysis and Beating James Bailey at pool (poor guy hasn’t beat me this week). [Ed. We've only played twice]

Rich: Continued work with VoIP, this includes doing a phase 1 roadmap, preparing for an upcoming workshop and reviewing feedback for the new VoIP interface.

Dave: Today I have gone through the weekly traffic management review; this involves reviewing the platform performance and balance over the last week and discussing whether DSL pipe balancing may be required. I have also been looking at customer tickets and reviewed the latest port/signature request updates and passed on to the network team.

Networks, with John:

My name is John and I’m the Database Architect working as part of the Platform Team.

A large part of my time is spent designing database solutions and reviewing SQL code for the various projects, large and small, that are in planning or in progress here at PlusNet and that’s taken up most of my day today.

I also work closely with the other DBAs to resolve database related issues and plan for the future of our database platform.

When time allows I’m always looking to improve and expand on the ‘off-line’ reporting services we have here. This involves creating data feeds from disparate production systems into a central data warehouse and creating procedures to pre-process that data into suitable formats for reporting. This feeds into key performance indicator reports for the various departments as well as making self-serve reporting and analysis available.

Comms, with Chris:

Today in Comms has been yet another busy one, all of us stretched between our normal daily work and the round of meetings that all seemed to crop up this afternoon.

Bob has spent his day sat upstairs with networks, probably hiding because it’s his turn to make a cuppa. While up there he’s been keeping an eye on the problems raised today following last nights rollout and also doing his spot of contacting the heaviest users of our mail platform. Additionally he’s been writing some comms for a rollout on the email platform and the colocation move next week.

James has been working away in the forums and on his personal tickets inbetween meetings. He’s been discussing the traffic management system and the BBYW Pro product with various people from around the business.

Mand has kept an eye on problems too today whilst also answering multiple questions on home phone as normal. She’s continued sorting out further training for the business on the home phone services and has managed to clear some of her task work too.

I’ve been blogging the results of September’s Customer Satisfaction survey and you can see this tomorrow. We are also going to be doing a pretty big rollout at the start of next week so I’ve been involved in the meetings for this today and getting the service status prepared for posting in the morning.

All in all it’s been busy! Don’t forget PlusNet in the Pink tomorrow

Marketing, from Mark:

Tis been another varied and hectic day in marketing.

We have been looking at our referral strategy for the next couple of years and doing some final prep for our referral revamp project.

Preparations are also underway for “In the Pink Day” and we are certainly looking forward to a fun day for a good cause. Rumour has it that some of the guys are trying to find pink skirts for the day…..worrying.

PR has featured heavily on our workstack today and we have completed some successful work with journalists.

And last but definitely not least. Yay. Another award. Todays announcement of the Computer Shopper “Best Broadband Provider” Award has kept us busy writing content and dealing with queries.

This is the third award for Plusnet this year and a sure sign that we are back to our award winning ways. Unrivalled joy abounds.

Today’s update from the Development team comes from Ali McGowan, Project Manager.

Firstly, hello from Dev! Well… the first bit of news is that I am no longer a ‘newbie’. I’ve been at PlusNet now for nearly five weeks and it’s amazing how time has flown (and how many meetings I have been to… 37 in the first two weeks…).

Now Kat mentioned yesterday that we’ve settled into our new development floor at PlusNet Towers – but as we’re now 2 storeys away from the coffee machine, this is causing various Brew Round fiascos and has also resulted in some health and safety issues. Or more accurately me trying to carry too many mugs of hot drinks at once and either pouring these all over myself or liberally distributing tea down the stairs. This was of course cleared up immediately

One unlikely benefit of the department move is that I now have to run up more flights of stairs to see people in other departments, so I am now feeling extra lean. This means I can eat more cakes at lunchtime.

Anyway, I work alongside Tony, our other Project Manager (and great mentor) in the Dev team and I’m working on five different products/projects at present.

Just a quick update on our remote development in India, which is going very well indeed. Four of my five current projects are being developed remotely, so I’ve spent time over the last few weeks getting to know the teams and of course holding regular catch ups. We are generally very pleased with the quality of the development work and the timescales, which are being adhered to.

The most important of these as far as our customers go is the upgrade to our SMS messaging service. We currently use this handy system to update our customers if they have a fault. However, we are now updating and enhancing this service so that our customers can also text us back. The development work on this project is on target and looking good.

Separately, we are nearing completion of an update to one of our existing products. This includes various changes that will strengthen our product offering – more of that next time!

I’m also working on two internal productivity tools which will upgrade different parts of our software platform that automates large parts of our business.

My final project is a new software platform for our business… but my lips must remained sealed on this one for now

Thus finishes today’s End of Day. Want even more good news? tomorrow’s Friday!

See you then,

James

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