Guess who got roped into doing this again today? I think it was Colin’s turn today, but some sort of train saga meant him getting in pretty late today so has quite a bit to catch up on!

I’ve spent a good part of the day demonstrating our internal operating system ‘Workplace’ and how we manage our project processes to a senior program manager from BT Design. He seemed quite impressed with Workplace and enthusiastic about the environment and culture here at PlusNet. This is ‘a good thing’ ™ as it reaffirms some of the reasons as to why BT bought us; our culture and Workplace.

Starting the reports today is the newly hitched Cam from Development

First week back from honeymoon after getting married in Las Vegas!

Currently ongoing with major project work with most of the other developers in the department. Some great team work and management of this project has meant that tight deadlines are being met and any slippage is soon brought back when new functionality is required. We’ve moved on to beta while I’ve been away so at the moment it’s all hands to the pump whilst we fix any bugs that are found – for the size of the project we’re doing really well and if we can keep going like this we’ll be meeting our target launch date with success.

Our monthly rally occurred today and it was very good to hear the progress of the company, plans for the future and recognize employees within the company that have been going above and beyond in the past month.

Marketing up next with an update from Phil

With high speed winds hurtling past our windows today, we imagined we were in snowier weather by carrying on with planning for Christmas and the festive month ahead.

Amongst other things – 2 new people came to PlusNet HQ after applying for our Web Designer role (here’s a link if you’d like to join us too – PlusNet Careers site ), Chris kicked off the newsletter and Martyn helped with an email about our VoIP services.

And we’re all glad that Referrals Mark managed to make it back safely – his plane back from Ireland was at best ‘turbulent’

Emma reports in from the CSC

Today has been very busy, what with a brief system failure (which we continued to work through) and lots more sales calls than we normally see.

Our top 5 today are slightly different to that of the norm:

The most amount of calls we have seen today is for router setup. When we introduced sign up over the phone a lot of customers don’t have access to the Internet at all, therefore this is their first step. Thankfully the routers we send are fairly easy to use so getting customers online is usually a doddle.

Secondly, Mac users, quite a few of these today, including email, connection issues and other settings. Today has been unusually high with regrades to these users, usually we get one customer a day, however today has been exceptionally high.

For the third instance, sales calls, we deal with lots of them before customer services get in around 8am, signing people up to new packages and providing support and guidance with current customers wanting to change their package to either save money or add extra features.

Lower down on the list is customers calling for email client configuration, checking their details and their email address. Many customers aren’t aware of the format we use which is usually the problem authenticating.

Thank you for reading!

Matt B from QA throws in a report which is much shorter and sweeter than Gary’s was yesterday

In QA today we’re a bit depleted with 2 of our staff away. Gav is having a well deserved day off after working last weekend while Matt R is out on work stuff.

Gary and Nige have been busy with some project testing. Early days on this one so still finding lots of bugs, but they’re being fixed by the developers as quickly as they pop up so we’re moving in the right direction.

Paul has been working on problems today. He’s has his headphones on most of the day and I’m sure I heard some Spice Girls playing! (Ed. Ye gods!)

Catherine, as well as gatecrashing our lads lunch, has been testing some improvements to our internal testing platform. Very useful stuff for us!

Steve has been doing the usual managery stuff keeping us all in check and giving me this EOD to write. He’s laughing now but he’s writing it tomorrow!

Finally, I’ve been testing a new Meeting Manager system for internal use which will make our jobs a lot easier! Not the most interesting thing in the world but you can’t test exciting things like Super Immersing Touch-o-vision every day. Ooops! Just let our next project out of the bag!

Bye for now.

By the tone of the update from Darren in Products, I think Bob has been making him tea!

Well today is the End of week for me as tomorrow I have a day off, this has meant I have had to pass some of my daily work across to Shaun to do tomorrow. We had a full Pod today which was nice, though the stick of rock I challenged Ian to get me from London yesterday didn’t show up, however Dave brought one in and has had it on his desk all day, though what he doesn’t realise is that as soon as he leaves it for a second IT’S MINE MUAHAHAHA!!!!.

Today has been another busy day in Products, Maria led this months PlusNet rally and a great job she did too (I vote she does it again next month ). Maria has also helped me chase a hardware management issue with BT as well as planning for our strategic meeting.

Ian has been working on a trial for some new hardware and arranging various supplier visitors for next week. Ian has also continued to write up his notes from yesterdays very productive meetings in London.

Shaun has been doing analysis all day; Churn analysis, analysis of customers that didn’t get activated, usage analysis and random analysis. Anyone would think he’s some sort of analyst…………..

Rich has continued work on the upcoming VoIP trial; this includes preparing for supplier meetings next week and continuing with the T&Cs.

Dave has continued work on his next blog. Gone through lots of tickets and port requests and led the weekly Traffic Management meeting.

Kate returns with another insight into PlusNet’s finance department

The Finance team are a bit light on the ground today. Fiona is currently on her way to Egypt (lucky thing!) whilst James suffered a serious footballing injury last night (not so lucky!)

The rest of us, meanwhile have been knuckling down as usual. Jen has been working on domains billing and tickets , Mark has been looking after the failed billing team, Mike and Magda have been working on the strat plan and I have been finishing the supplier payments as well as other things.

And finally – the Finance football team are scouting about for new additions to the team after James’ horror injury, further fuelling the “Ringers” accusations

Dan from networks next.

Today I have been working on Customer facing tickets, many varied flavours today… ranging from relay blacklisting to the restoring of CGI space. I’ve also carried out daily tasks which involve the training of the Inbound Spam Filter and monitoring of the Abuse mailbox.

As for every one else its been a pretty busy day regarding Operations due to an early morning roll out which caused a loss of access to some of our Sheffield based services due to a failed switch. Engineers were sent to the site and services were restored shortly after.

Monitoring the network today is Patryk who is also the first line on call engineer this week.
Working on VoIP Replication and FTP authentication was Riswan.
Mike Grice worked on Web storage.
Mark Loveley worked on the Network outage, & web storage firewalls rules.
Ben performed further work on the DNS Scripts.
Simon worked on the web storage expansion with Mike.
Ade worked on setting up further monitoring for some new network kit.
Denis helped with the network outage this morning and then onto project work.
Matt worked on worked tickets and port requests.
Michael worked on Problems and some staging work.
Sarah worked on Problems including the Network outage and a Plesk P1.

James has decided to risk the piratical wrath of Pete in the Comms update. Oh dear!

Good evening everyone.

Pete’s been getting a bit grumpy about our Tea theme in the Comms EOD posts, so we had better start by letting you all know that 4 (yes, FOUR) rounds of tea have been made today and unsurprisingly, none by me or Bob. In fairness, I’m probably actually even worse at making tea than anyone else in the team. but I’m the most Senior member. So there.

Today I’ve been working through my usual batch of personal tickets as well as spending a large amount of time in our forums and helping out customers wherever I can. I’m also rather ecstatic to announce that I might just have managed to get BT to move someones telephone line to a new exchange, which is somewhat tricky, to say the least.

Matt has been along to the weekly traffic management meeting. He’s been calling up some of our dialup customers to encourage them to signup to broadband. He’s also been hanging out in his favourite stomping ground over at Sheffield Forum

Chris has been spending some time working on the Customer Satisfaction survey. He’s been posting in our various fora (Ed: poncy so and so…) and handling some tickets. He also made tea.

Bob’s been hiding up with Networks again, probably so that he doesn’t have to make tea. He was downstairs a bit first thing this morning, when Mand managed to pour half a cup of tea on him. But other than that, he’s been toiling away on some Comms regarding our VoIP platform and making sure that everything on the Network front is working well in addition to popping into our forums.

Mand has been spilling tea on Bob, keeping an eye on our internal problem process, doing some training with some of our newer members of staff as well as making a few posts in our forums.

We’ve also all been to our Monthly Rally, where the whole company gets together to hear how we’ve performed over the last month and it’s certainly looking good! We’ll be back tomorrow with further woes of teaness. See you then.

And finally, a rather tardy Colin from the Web Team

I get to bring you the Web Team update today, and we’ve been quite busy. We’ve managed to get our ‘Problem Pool’ down to 0 problems (Ed: RESULT!), but this doesn’t mean we’ll be resting – oh, no – we’ll be continuing to tweak things as we find them (as problems or just general maintenance) and fixing any issues that other people find, including issues customers raise.

We’ve also been working on some aspects of the Community Site, including the migration of Forum Posts, and Rupert has been continuing on the referrals refresh – as well as supporting some of our design team in Rollouts and some of their project work.

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So that’s it for today. I’ll let you know if James survives Pete’s piratical wrath tomorrow. Also, do me a favour and find some more content and design problems so I can keep my guys busy? Thanks….

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This entry was posted by Kelly Dorset on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 6:30 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.