Pete was supposed to be doing the EOD today, but at about 16:30, as threatened yesterday, he went ‘unplugged’ to actually get some real work done. Being as it’s about time I did my shift as Ed, I’ve stepped into the breach.

Just before we start with the updates, do you want to hear something a little sad? I’ve just come back from a 2 week holiday, and each night at about 7pm I’d point my ‘phones browser to the community site to find out what’s been going on. Is that sad? Should I be locked up for my own health? Anyone else found themselves reading them that obsessively?

On with the updates!

Jon from the CSC with their update

Another busy day here in the CSC, compounded this morning by a couple of lingering issues from last night’s maintenance that resulted in us being unable to access either the portal or our internal workplace servers for a brief period. In true PlusNet fashion though, we continued taking calls and offered the best support we could whilst these issues were resolved.

Lots of new customers calling in to ask questions and clarify their understanding on the products that we offer before completing the signup process, along with a smattering of newer customers calling in to clarify the differences between their existing packages and the newer Broadband Your Way offerings.

Second on the list is faults, both customers calling in for assistance in diagnosing a newly occurred fault, or some customers calling in to p
rovide further information after we’ve contacted them to request that additional checks be carried out within their premises.

A mix of new customers wanting to confirm their details in order to configure their equipment and software, along with existing customers who are no longer sure of their login details.

Email is another popular support topic for today, with a number of customers contacting us for assistance on configuring their email clients with their new PlusNet email details. For anyone having similar issues, there’s a handy guide for the popular clients here.

With an upswing in sales, there’s the usual upswing in new customers contacting us to ask assistance setting their routers up, which is generally a case of following the setup guide though in some cases further work is needed in order to get their computer talking to the router in order to complete the setup process.

In Summary, our top issues of the day were:

1. Sales Queries
2. Faults
3. Username & Password Verification
4. Email
5. Hardware Configuration

Rick from Development has this update.

Hello all. I have just returned from a very relaxing week off in the North of Scotland to the usual flury of activity. (Ed: I wonder if he checked the EODs from his ‘phone too?)

Lots going on here on the development floor with most of the department working very hard on hardening and improving our internal systems to improve the smoothness of operations here at PlusNet. My part in this since I returned has been supporting our applications through our various stages of testing to assure quality for our customers. This can sometimes be a trying and challenging task due to the nature of what we do and our rigorous testing processes, but as usual the collaboration here in the team has made things go pretty smoothly.

One of our newer members, Ryszard, completed his first roll out to the live platform today – so well done Ryszard! Truly a rite of passage as this involves getting your application through the afore mentioned stages of test.

OK, that’s it from me, until next time. Over and out!

Sore loser Chris from Marketing has the following:

We’ve been embracing the Christmas spirit here in Team Marketing and thinking of some Xmas promotion ideas (Watch this space) We’ve also been working hard on some upcoming press releases and I found time to update the poll on the Community site – go and vote, you know you want to.

We’ve continued our recruitment drive by reviewing some more CVs and recovered from a embarrassing defeat of Products and Marketing at the hands of Finance in the inter company 5-a-side league

Damn those Finance ringers!!

Darren from Products continues with further football woes

Products are still aching after yesterdays Football match vs The “Finance” team (more like the ringers team). I went off in the first 10 minutes because of an old back injury (which is now feeling better after a nice long bath and some back spray) and unfortunately we lost (though they did have a sub unlike us, though that’s my fault). But however once I am out of the team I am sure the Products/Marketing team will be at the top of the league.

As its Wednesday we also had our weekly KPI review and I have been reworking some of the graphs to show more presentable data. Today I have continued to chase some hardware issues with BT. I have brought myself up to date with the current VoIP project. I have managed to complete lots of little tasks that have been building up and I have been sorting out an order allocation for our insert sheets.

Shaun has continued his ongoing work on churn, attended the weekly KPI meeting, he has also been involved in project discussions and problem investigations.

Maria was back in today after her holiday. Unfortunately she has also been extremely busy all day preparing for the upcoming PlusNet Monthly rally (which she will be presenting to the whole company tomorrow).

Rich has continued work on VoIP; this includes completing FAQ guides, starting work on the T&Cs and continued to clarify the trial support process (this includes answering a lot of my questions to bring me up to date)

Dave has continued to process tickets and port requests, he is also organising a hardware trial and he has started work on his next blog post.

Ian is away galavanting in London, but he did promise to bring a stick of rock back (lets see if that happens).

Meanwhile, Matt seems pretty chipper over in Comms. He obviously wasn’t playing football last night.

Hello World!

Comms here, bringing you another end of day from what is obviously PlusNet’s best and sexiest department. Bob has spent most of today arguing about the content of help pages on our website (though he won so that’s all good) and has again been watching email – configuring spam protection, updating service statuses, relay policing and suchlike. He also made tea again – woop woop!

Chris has spent the day on the networks floor fielding change controls and helping Bob with service status posts. He’s also been looking at VoIP with our networks engineers. I have been buried under an avalanche of tasks and have had nothing but a laptop keyboard to dig myself out, though as this end of day nears its, er, end I realise that I can in fact see daylight. I’ve also been dealing with an increasingly busy Sheffield Forum and answering tickets.

James has been helping out the provisioning team and has also been checking out the sign up journey to see if there are any ways in which this might be improved, he has also been responding to a highly impressive number of forum posts. Mand, meanwhile, has again been training and when not with the n00bs has been checking up on one or two problem fixes for various bits of PlusNet.

Jonathon from the Web Team next!

Hi, Jonathan here from the web team.

Today has been concentrating on the regular duties, problem fixes and updates to support pages. We’re trying to provide more and more links to external sites where appropriate and from time to time the sites we link to will change address.

We’re looking at a new system to report these broken links to allow us to be even more responsive.

We’ve also been looking into the emails that we send out to customers. We sent out a huge number of emails every day and these all need to be kept relevant. We’re looking at the various processes such as signing up, moving house, changing product and we’ll make sure we visit every point of each journey to make sure we’re communicating the process properly in each case.

There’s also some work going on with automating our reporting. We have quite a few network graphs that are generated automagically and I’ve been working on a similar system for our support ticket ratings.

Thanks for reading!

Mark from Finance does a remarkable job of not sounding too smug about the football.

Today Finance have been mostly celebrating their win over the Product/Marketing team in last night’s football.

Well done to the Finance team – who were well prepared, organised and had subs (always a good idea).

All this celebrating hasn’t stopped us closing 108 customer tickets leaving 38 tickets still to work through. James has been working on our month end reporting and Kate has been making supplier payments.

Gary from QA chips in with what he calls a short and sweet update. I’ll educate him…

Hi, Its Gary from our Quality Assurance Team (QA) bringing you our EOD. QA is a relatively small team so I’ll make this short and sweet.

Today I’ve been working on some view my usage and Ellacoya (our traffic management system) improvements which has mostly consisted of dialling into the network as a customer on various accounts, downloading some stuff, disconnecting and then checking things have updated where they should have. This has actually been a lot more interesting than you would imagine, the testing part that is, not the downloads!

Gavin – Went home early today just after lunch (Chicken Kiev’s mmmmmmm!) after being in since 4am this morning rolling out some billing system improvements.

Paul – Has been testing some problem fixes through to our Live platform today reaching a total of 5 problems being fixed and rolled out. Although this seems like a lowish number the amount of testing required for some of them makes this quite a good achievement.

Matt R – Today has been trying to work out the best course of action to get a constant supply of Rib ‘n’ Saucy Nik Naks as the vending machine has been broken for most of the day

Matt B – Has been working on some internal system improvements that are non customer facing but tools we very much need.

Nigel – Has been working on one of our latest projects today re-testing and closing down some niggly little bugs.

Catherine – Has been working on our testing platform trying to get to grips with its airs and graces and also trying to push some general improvements.

Stephen (The Boss man) – Stephen has been his usual self today liaising with lots of different departments, upsetting people in general and driving the team to make things get done such as this EOD.

That’s about it from me folks, have a nice evening.

and finally, Matt from Networks.

Hi, it’s Matt from Networks. Today I’ve been working mainly on tickets. For the most part they’ve been quite varied which is always good (keeps me on my toes). Dan has also been working through tickets with me as well as performing some mail space management tasks. I have also been working on port additions in the latter part of the day, basically reviewing ports that we will be implementing in the traffic management system shortly. Well that’s what I’ve been working on, here’s what the rest of the team have been up to:

Sarah: Working on a problem with one our relay servers, tickets
Dan: Tickets
Carl: Scaling the Ellacoya network
Ade: Setting up opsview monitoring for devices, nmis setup and also some tunnelling stuff.
Ben: Tweaking DNS scripts, helped Sarah with the relay server problem
Mark: DSL platform monitoring, working on a VPN problem
Patryk: Monitoring, cleaning up our BGP peering
Mike: Web storage upgrade
Michael: Supporting developers with testing and roll outs of future improvements
Denis: Configuring new VPN tunnels
Rizwan: Working on a VoIP P1
Russ: Optimisation work on our monitoring platform

Blimey. That was one big EOD! I hope there wasn’t too much in that one. If so, pop a comment on here telling us so.

Thank for reading!

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This entry was posted by Kelly Dorset on Wednesday, November 7th, 2007 at 6:38 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.