Disconnections, reconnections, projects, operational duties and cups of tea. Another day in the life of your favourite ISP.

First off we have an update from Brad in CSC:

Today in the CSC we have again been working hard to ensure our customers are kept happy and satisfied. It’s good to see that 99% of our ‘flu victims have recovered!

The Top 5 reasons for calling the Support Centre today:

1. Disconnections 20% - Early on in the morning we moved two of our broadband gateways which resulted in customers being disconnected. Affected customers should be able to reconnect straight away.
2. Failed Billing 10% - Quite a few customers have failed billing due to card expiry or other various reasons.
3. Fault Updates 5% - Customers calling for any news on their service.
4. New Faults 5% - Customers calling up to report new connection issues.
5. Sales 5% - Still lots of sales calls coming in.

Now over to James in Comms:

It’s been another busy day in the Comms Team, with generic shortages in tea.

I’ve primarily handling forums and some tickets, with a meeting thrown in for good measure. I’ve also been looking into our competitors’ business products a little bit more.

Chris was distraught this morning when Mand offered to make him a cup of tea, but he had a full cup! Other than that, he’s been camped up on the networks floor and writing a barrage of planned maintenance work.

Mand has been stuck in meetings for most of the day, as well as handling our internal problems, doing some training and looking into some Home Phone queries.

Bob has continued his never-ending task of writing extensive service status messages which you should be able to see fairly shortly. He’s also been popping into the forums when he gets a chance. He also managed to break my Internet connection when he plugged in his phone. Twice.

In Products, Darren updates us with the following:

The Product team are still recovering from last night’s football match, Sheffield Wednesday Vs Scunthorpe. Wednesday lost but the atmosphere at the pitch was as great - as ever.

Wednesday (the day of the week that is, not the footy team) means only one thing in Products! KPI’S, KPI’S and more KPI’S, yes it was the weekly Product KPI meeting, analysing the company stats. Today I have done my usual daily tasks, got Finance to confirm my order for Halloween decorations and gone through the process of disputed WLR calls.

Maria has also been extremely busy; she’s been doing a lot of HR work with the new HR Director. Maria has also been organising 1:1’s, sorting out my annual leave and on the Products front, been discussing the issues around disputed WLR calls - plus my POMS tasks and jobs!!

Rich has been ill, but like the trooper he is still managed to come to work (nothing to do with eating too much at the Wednesday match he tell us). He has continued his ongoing work on the VoIP platform, created email content for 0845/VoIP survey and requested the data set for specific VoIP groups and done a lot of work on dial ports.

Shaun has also been buried with work today; he’s been in several meetings about projects, referrals, churn and company KPI’s. He also did a very bad impression of Adam Hart Davies (you’re so cool Shaun).

I haven’t seen much of Ian today as he’s been off in several meetings, busy as ever. Ian has continued work towards bringing our CGI and advanced hosting up to speed, setting up the agenda for a meeting with a network appliance supplier, working with Finance on a proposal for a change to Metronet pricing, and planning his workload for the rest of the week.

Chris in Marketing reports:

Today in Marketing we held our weekly KPI review and brainstorming session where we study last week’s figures and think of new ways to attract new customers.

I’ve been finalising the copy for the business Newsletter and dealing with some incoming marketing enquiries.

We’ve also been working on some new landing pages and reviewing some C.V.’s as our recruitment drive continues.

Andy in Development tells us a little about his world:

My name’s Andy. I’m a PHP Developer at PlusNet. For the last 2 months I have been working on our Manage Your Mail system in the Portal. The project involves working with the links between the Manage My Mail front-end that our customers see and the actual back-end mail delivery sub-system. The work has been very delicate and so has taken a lot of effort and concentration.

It’s important with this sort of work, especially if it can affect customer’s experience, that we’re able to give it the respect it deserves. Sometimes we have to make difficult decisions about whether resources are available to continue a project properly or whether we need to put it on hold until we can guarantee resources and make sure the right level of quality is maintained.

Today was one of those times when it has been necessary to make that difficult decision, and although I understand the reasons for it, I can’t still help but be frustrated by the outcome! (In case you haven’t guessed, my work on the mail system is on hold for a fortnight).

Luckily, however, I get to vent my frustrations….. On the weekend of the 4th of November I have arranged for a Dev day out - Tank Paint Balling - yes you read that right! We will be driving real tanks and firing 40mm paint ball cannons at each other! My manager obviously saw this coming and has ‘family commitments’ that day but watch out the rest of PlusNet Dev!

From myself (Pete) in the Web Team:

I’ve been busy prepping our quarterly/monthly appraisals and distracting everyone from their tasks by dragging them, in turn, kicking and screaming, into a meeting room to face the music. I’ve also been sorting out processes that ensure we can keep being reactive and publish content to our website quickly and without undue delay. There’s LOTS of project work underway from all members of the team and there’s a real buzz in the department right now. It’s a good vibe and pleasing to see everyone being really productive, happy despite (or because of?) the pressure.

[From Ian - Pete, with the backing of the community forum, also convinced the right people that the natural home for the EOD report is right here, on the front page.]

Finally, for today, we have Mark in Finance:

Today Finance has closed 65 customer tickets which is not as high as usual. Today Jen has been off and we have had several complicated deliveries of server equipment to arrange which has taken up lots of time.

We close the day with a total of 198 tickets still to work - so this will be our focus tomorrow.

Mike and Magda have nearly completed their work on the strategic plan.

Over and out.

Over and out indeed. Off home now then.. leaving our fabulous CSC late shift doing what they do best; helping you with your problems. Until next time..
P-j

Bookmark to:

This entry was posted by Peter Jackson on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 7:00 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.