Wow, Friday has come around quickly this week! I’ve spent a lot of time today in meetings today, most importantly a wash up meeting to talk about how our PCI network improvement roll out went this week, and a great workshop where we brainstormed ways to generate sales lifts and publicity. Nick (Head of Sales) has told me I can’t tell you any of our ideas, but I will say this: “If we gave you £1,000,000, how would you use it to publicise PlusNet?” Answers in the comments please.

Now, on with the EOD reports!

First up is James from the CSC.

Today in the CSC we have had some new colleagues buddying up with our technical support team and learning the way we deal with customer queries both through calls and tickets. If you are interested in getting a job at PlusNet see the careers page for more information and we would be happy to see you. Our managers have been contacting prospective applicants doing initial telescreens to hopefully start them on the wonderful journey of being a PlusNet employee today.

We have also had our team meetings today where everyone has been briefed on the latest news of the company such as our recent Madasafish partnership and also how we are doing in terms of departmental and inter-team scores.

So onto the Top 5 reasons for customers calling us today:

1. Router Delivery 20% – This is related to the P1 problem we have where our suppliers were having problems distributing the Voyager 210 routers in time. You can see the P1 problem on our portal.

2. Sales 20% – Lots of contacts today with prospective customers wanting to sign up for our services and also existing customers who wish to change their product or add Home Phone.

3. Provisioning Updates 10% – Customers have called us with relation to their House Moves or general Broadband Activation dates

4. Router Setup 5% – This is where customers need help guiding through setting up their router configuration

5. Email setup 5% – We have had a few calls from customers who need assistance in configuring their new email addresses in their email software.

Other 40%

James from Comms continues to draw out that tea theme…

We draw to the close of another week in the Comms Team. A week full of excitement and hard work, as with any other week. We’re all ready to put our feet up for a couple of days and get some well earned sleep!

My day has been fairly chaotic with various issues popping up. I’ve been looking into some provisioning issues for Mark, chasing up on a hardware problem, doing some service status work, posting in our forums, reviewing some emails and doing some tickets. I’ve been sticking to my guns and not making any tea.

Teaboy Taylor has been working away on some provisioning tickets and helping out the BOT Team. We haven’t seen much of him today, but rumours are that he’s been flat out, but has found a new source of tea.

Mand has been doing her normal job of dealing with problems, helping out with home phone issues and joining in the community funness.

Bob’s been upstairs hiding again. We’re assuming that he’s been doing something other than hiding under someone’s desk.

Chris has been in one of his strange moods again. This normally happens on a Friday. Still, he’s been involved in various meetings, looking into some problems and generally being a pain about tea.

=====
Tea Problem – UPDATE

This is an update to the previously reported issue of certain members of the Comms Team not making tea. The initial report can be found in yesterday EOD report.

Chris, Matt and Mand have continued to work towards a resolution to this problem, however they are struggling to find a root cause of this issue. Currently assumptions are being drawn around laziness and lack of motivation.

As a workaround, they are currently attempting to draw thirst from the offending members of the team by not making any tea.

We hope to be able to provide an update to this issue early next week.

Kind regards,

James Bailey
Tea Offender

I’m serious considering creating them their own tea blog. Anyway, next up is Marketing’s Musical Martyn. (check out that alliteration!)

“Start spreading the news, get referring today. You wanna be a part of it? New York, New York!”

What was that little musical outburst about? Well, as you might have noticed, last night we launched a new My Referrals ‘Win a trip to New York’ promo. Today we’ve been sending an email to let customers know about this chance to win a fantastic prize.

We’ve also been brainstorming for future promotional ideas and I’ve been working on the style guidelines mentioned yesterday. Chris has been busy with a flood of Press Room enquiries, and in a little while we’ll all be going to the pub

See you next week.

The less tuneful Colin from the Web Team comes next

Today we’ve had a productive today, involving importing the posts from our Portal Forums to the Community Site, and breaking our internal workplace management system (Ed: Don’t worry, it got better!). Thankfully, that wasn’t all one person! We’ve also continued working on the Referrals Mini Project, as well as a small bit on one of our Sister brands, Pay as you Host.

Jonathan also been updating the CSC, beating Colin at pool a few times and working on Support Page updates.

The rest of the team have been working on the Madasafish project that we’ve mentioned previously.

Hope everyone has a nice weekend!
Colin

Ryszard from Development is in a talkable mood…

Hi all, it’s Ryszard here in dev. I’ll have to keep this update less of a ramble on than my last one, but there’s still plenty to talk about. By now you should know that PlusNet are joining forces with MadAsAFish, and that’s the reason us hackers here in dev have been quiet on the community EOD side for a while, simply because most of us have been beavering away on the project which we obviously couldn’t talk about until now!

If you were to wander in here and look around, you’d see us all with bloodied and battered noses to the grindstone, as we push for the last stretch of dev work and bug fixing for the systems we’re building for MAAF. Crunch time on any large project is always tough, and it’s no exception for this one, but there’s that definite sense of excitement and trepidation as we close in on a big testing date coming real soon. It’s important we hit the ground running with that one, so the almighty push is on.

Our daily bug track meeting is always an interesting one, as we rally round the list of bits that aren’t quite right, so we can help each other out to get things fixed. If only we could broadcast them….today’s was hilarious, and the laughs helped break a couple of days worth of bug meeting tension that seemed to hang around.

As for what I’m working on, since we’re always pushed to make these EODs personal, today I got stuck into fixing the MAAF speed tester, which is part of the support portfolio of tools and services that customers will be able to use to make sure their connection is doing the right thing, and I’ve also been touching invoicing and portal systems on my way round the codebase today. I’ve also written a small personal backup and roll script in Python, to help me push my code out to our testing pods in a consistent way and let me keep track of my changes outside of CVS, and I’ve just put down a RADIUS dev investigation to write this EOD.

So we’re in crunch mode just now, which means we’ll probably still be a touch quiet here and there, but the deliverable at the end is going to be well worth it!

The stress may have been getting to Matt in QA this week…

Wow. Working like crazy today in QA. It’s been a hard day with one person on leave and work coming at us faster than ever.

Problems with our internal systems and bug squishing on the latest project haven’t stopped the continued search for Rib ‘n’ Saucy nik naks.

It’s been a really tough week with more to come over the weekend and following weeks. Our minds are firmly focussed on party time at the end of the month.

Hope you all have a good weekend, but spare a thought for us that are here working. Rib ‘n’ Saucy nik nak donations can be sent to:

Matt Roberts (QA)
PlusNet
2 Tenter Street
etc…

Darren in products up next

Today has been a game of two halves. Maria and I have been working endlessly to resolve some hardware issues with BT, the morning felt as though we were hitting our head against a brick wall, however in the afternoon things actually started to get moving and we managed to start getting hardware sent out to customers. This process also meant we had to keep regular updates with Comms and resolve an order file error with Networks.

Shaun has continued his work on churn, attended several meetings involving traffic management and operational reviews. He has also spent the entire afternoon winding me up, which I have to say he is very good at (I’ll get you back Shaun, don’t you worry).

Dave hosted his weekly traffic management meeting; reviewing the week’s Network performance, looking forward to next week activities, looking into the Max upgrading process. Dave has also updated the supported games list in the community forum, investigated a problem with the new version of Ventrilo (and can I just say that the new connecting noise when entering the new version is a hell of a lot better, my ears no longer bleed) and continued work on his next blog.

Finance next!

Well finance have also been low on numbers today with both Mark, James and Claire off. So in their absence Kate has been working on some Brightview stuff and billing. Jen has been looking into the domains and I have been working on the KPI’s. 91 Tickets have been closed.

Fiona has arrived back from hols and taken back the reins of managing the failed billing team.

Its children in need tonight so were all off home to sit in baths filled with beans. See you monday.

Finally is Jason from Networks

Hi all, Jason here from networks. I’m the Information Security Manager here at PlusNet.

Another busy week! (Whenever isn’t it?) A lot has already been said about the PCI network roll out that rolled this week but enough just can’t be said about it. The PCI network is a major step to overall PCI compliance and could not have happened without the hard work and determination of the people who were involved – true PlusNetters.

Along with the major PCI roll out networks have continued with the Spam trialling as well as maintaining the network on a day to day basis.

So what’s happened in the world of information security at PlusNet this week? Well this week has seen work progressing on reviewing and consolidating our information security policies. Some have been re-written in line with ISO27001 – an international standard on information security best practices- What’s the use of policies? I hear you say. Did a policy ever stop a hacker breaking into a network? No, that was a firewall. Did a security policy ever stop a worm in its tracks? No, that was anti virus software. Of course, the hacker didn’t stop his exploitation of a hack because he heard the organisation had a really good security policy. Even some of the best organisations with the best policies didn’t stop the MyDoom or Nimda viruses. But maybe, just perhaps, these policies meant that many corporate computers around the world had up to date virus scanners that prevented their infection from these viruses. That is the key. Policies don’t provide good security; they define security for an organisation and mandate its use.

Well everyone in networks is now looking forward to a relaxing weekend where we all can recharge our batteries ready for the challenges that lay ahead next week.

–
Well, that it from me tonight, and from PlusNet for the week. Have a nice weekend!

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This entry was posted by Kelly Dorset on Friday, November 16th, 2007 at 4:52 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.