It’s half way through our first full week of the New Year and certain members of the team are begining to feel the strain at having to work 5 days for the first time in six weeks.

Our daily tour of the building begins with Catherine and the QA department.

“5.30? Pff! I’ve already written ours! (Ed: I asked for submissions by 5.30PM – Catherine posted this at 1542)

Today in QA….
- we had a team meeting to discuss how we’re going to face the New Year.

- we took on an artistic challenge on how to alert the business to our daily half hour of test plan creation. A message left on the team whiteboard will be ignored after a couple of days, so if we change it every day, with luck our lovely colleagues will notice and find something else to do between 1.30 and 2pm. Today we have the gender non-specific ‘QA Bod’ telling everyone via a large speech bubble. But what will it be tomorrow?

Gender non-specific QA Bod

- we continued the push on some Madasafish issues

- we worked on the daily onslaught of problems. Someone will always spot more problems while they’re testing, though, meaning that the queue never quite goes down.

- we made some very bad jokes – for example,

Stephen: ‘I’m off’
Gary: ‘I thought I could smell something!’

Yes, it’s a laugh riot here, folks!

- we all had a very tasty roast dinner and discussed whether horseradish should have chillies in it.

That’s all for today, folks!”

Also on the ground floor, Development’s update comes from Ben:

“Well, lets start off with the important stuff first. I’d like to thank my development team mate Ryszu for his post last Friday (4th), and yes, I agree, very sexy. Secondly, it’s been a quiet day here in development, no we haven’t been taking it easy, I just forgot to bring my IPod to work today!!!

So what’s been going on down here today, I’ve been getting my latest project onto the beta platform ready for our quality assurance team to jump on to and give it thorough testing, they’ll pick up any additions that need to be made and bugs I may have missed during my development, which I’m sure will be few and far between!! Our internal customers have been crying out for this tool, it will allow them to quickly switch the view they see of our internal workplace and link together their many corporate accounts.

I’ve also been updating my self development objectives. Working as a developer we can start to drift away from the most important part of the business, you! So all of us here in development are going to spend some time working in our call centre (who as we speak are sat taking your calls and answering your questions in the floor above, what a great job they do BTW). I’ll be listening in on calls, responding to the questions you raise in the portal and seeing how the tools I’ve written are affecting your experience. I can then take this information into my development work and build better pages with you at the centre of the design and it will reinforce why we’re here, to provide you guys with the best service this side of Metropolis. So look out for a response to your questions from one of your local friendly developers soon.”

James from Business Support brings us this update:

“Today has been a really busy day for customers calling us or us calling customers to check on updated reported fault statuses. No particular common faults but just a common thing for customers receiving updates on faults reported either yesterday or Monday. So the majority of us have all been trying our best to helpout on this aswell as trying our best to respond to business customer support tickets within our target timescale.

Aaron and Kevin have advised me that everything has gone well from the new products on their Parbin brand which I referenced yesterday in my EOD posting, so if you have yet to check it out give them a look at ww.payh.co.uk

Micks training plans for our new starters is going really well and should be putting 6 new customer service agents into the CSC tomorrow so we have even more colleagues there assisting you all, which is splendid to hear.

Anyway thats it from us today, so when we have finished we might be playing Micks new Wii game “Mario & Sonic Olympics” which apparently is pretty cool. Game on!”

The scores on the doors in the CSC at the moment stand at:

Calls Offered: 1509
Calls Answered: 1061
Average Wait: 4m 51s

while Oli brings us the Top 5:

“1. SPAM – This still appears to be the main cause of contact at the moment with customers noticing an increase in the amount of SPAM Mail getting through, although customers seem to be happier with the email we have sent them.

2. Router Configuration – Still seems to be customers unable to configure the router. Many customers set up the hardware incorrectly or miss the realm off the end of the username. Customers seem to be calling in more often with problems setting up a wireless connection to the router, this works fine when the customer is walked through it.

3. Sales – Most agents have noted an increase in the amount of sales calls being handled again. Home Phone is becoming a popular subject, lots of requests for more information.

4. New Fault Checks – No particular patterns and no reported MSO’s. Most customers being advised of the relevant checks and then being asked to call back once this has been completed, generally appears to be more no sync problems that are being reported today.

5. Fault Updates – Customers are calling in because they have not heard anything regarding their open fault and generally they don’t have Internet access from an alternate PC.”

Matt brings us the Comms update:

“Ah, Wednesday, Wednesday.

Today your favourite Comms team have been working hard to bring you this end of day and as ever to enrich your broadband experience in all ways. To assist with this we have been working on the following:

James. This Comms stalwart has today been dealing with a number of important issues, including some account management, a number of tricky ticket issues, some problems, development change controls and also working in the forums where it becomes apparent he is to be rechristened. Please vote for Gloria. It’s a beautiful name.

Mand. Today mand has been training new starters and picking up problems, along with adding insight to several forums and newsgroups.

I have been helping out the logged faults team today though will be picking up my blogging and calls regarding referrals very shortly. I’ll also be covering the forums until 9.

Chris is still letting the side down somewhat by not being in the office – oh well. He’ll have to catch up on the tea when he’s back in.

Bob? Bob is officially the hero of the Comms team. He’s been picking up all the networks change controls, working towards the postini changeover, chasing problems and updating service status posts, but as ever his main issue of the day has been SPAM!*

*Please note the stylish Michael Buble mug in the lower right corner…

We hope you appreciate his efforts. I know the whole of Plusnet does. You’re my hero, Bob.

Comms out. Word.”

Darren from Products gives us this:

“It’s been a very busy day today in Products. I’ve been working on a hardware stock issue, evaluating a trial for the Royal Nation Institute of the Blind and hosting this weeks Products KPI meeting. Shaun’s been working on WLR analysis and the Company Dashboard. Dave’s been writing his next blog, auditing active DSL accounts, factoring audit of data and customer speed profiles into product design. Rich has been working on resolving a dial port issue and progressing VoIP work. Now its off to fulfil my New Years resolution by going to the gym at least once, well done me.”

Marketing give us their update via Chris:

“It’s been a very busy day today as we tackled a number of different tasks. Martyn has been preparing a home phone email due to be sent tomorrow and planning the testing stages of the new BBYW journey. We’ve also continued work on some upcoming print ads and had our weekly dose of graphs and statistics. I’ve also found time to do some PR prep work ahead of some upcoming releases and done some number crunching reviews of our Christmas promotions. I’m ready for a beer “

Mark from Networks gives us:

“Today networks have been busy as usual…

Me – problems with Voip reporting and planning a physical move of our Webmail and Frontpage servers to improve platform resilience.
Dunc – Problems
Rich – just been working on tickets, and getting annoyed at getting put on DNSBLs without hard evidence of wrong doings!
Ben – Fixed webmail P1 (caused by dodgy CGI scripts), tweaking of force9.net postini update script
Denis – IWF phase2: working on improving resiliency
MikeG – IWF changes and homepages scaling, and feeling Ill.
Carl – Trying to get an ISDN installed, more BV work, Safe internet/IWF work
Adey – Problems …. hardware replacement for a faulty server, ellacoya application review
Rizwan – Housekeeping, Debugging a system that talks to BT.
Josh – Improving our backup systems
Ian – Preparing for OOH work tonight.
Matt – Joost Problem, Port requests, Tickets, all the exciting stuff!!
Dan – RIPA’s, Abuse, Mail policing
MikeP – Supporting QA and our test environment.”

Crikey, it’s been a busy day today around the business!

Cheers
Colin

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This entry was posted by Colin Ogilvie on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 6:20 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.