I’m sure that you’ll all be either happy or heartbroken to hear that Gloria has now left us and James has returned for some EOD joyness. From my perspective, it’s a bit of a relief after my colleagues well and truly “did one” on me!

I don’t know about you all, but we’ve been trying to work out the last day it didn’t rain or snow up here in Sheffield and most of us can’t remember, although Nick in Products reckons it was okay last Sunday. We think he’s lying.

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On to the departmental updates!

Rick from Development (after giving me my £20 back) starts us off today:

Hello and welcome to the development EOD, and indeed EOW.

The weekend is approaching fast, I can’t quite believe its Friday already! This can only mean one of two things;

1. I have been hyper efficient all week

or

2. I have not got everything done that I needed to. I like to think its the 1st option, happy as I am in my deluded state!

We all seem to have recovered after the xmas and new year break and motivation levels within the team are running on full steam.

We have lots of plans for development in 2008, both locally and remotely. The work on MAAF phase 1 is almost complete and phase 2 is under way. Our remote development teams are hitting their targets with the 1st project live to rapturous applause. Our internal development tools and systems are under the microscope.

Some really good preliminary work is being done to improve the availability and quality of these systems to allow us to develop in a more integrated environment and also provide a more robust testing platform. This is great news for you guys as it means we will be able to design, build, test and deploy in shorter time frames! Phew… and its only week 2!

This week for me has consisted of getting some of the last bugs on MAAF phase 1 out the door, rebuilding my development machine and starting work on an integration environment for the department. Call me a geek, but I do find this pretty cool. It’s also a break from coding which can be nice from time to time. So, lots of virtual machines and services are the order of the day as I create my proof of concept.

OK – I concede I am a geek.

Right, that’s it from me. Still got a few things to finish up before the weekend so I bid you all farewell. Have a good weekend.

Community Site regular Pete from the CSC had this to say:

Our top five for today is…

1.Spam. Alot of customers calling due to high spam levels. Customers are receiving more spam than usual and alot of people are requesting to join the Postini Anti Spam Trial.

2.Faults calls – Customers calling for fault updates and also to report new faults. We’ve seen more synchronisation and authentication faults than usual. However a few have been caused by equipment losing its settings. Which leads us onto..

3.Router/modem configuration. Again new and existing customers needing help to setup their equipment for the first time or after a reset/replacement.

4.E-mail Setup. New and existing customers calling to configure e-mail clients/access webmail.

5.Sales. New customers calling to signup to our service, also the recent e-mail regarding homephone has generated alot of interest.

now it’s time for Catherine from QA, who’s still insisting on calling me Gloria

Hurrah, it’s Friday again! Not that we don’t enjoy our time at PlusNet Towers, but Friday means a lie-in tomorrow morning So, how have we filled our time today?

Gavin has been managing the testing environment again today, arranging code and database refreshes so we can test on an environment that’s as close to live as possible.

Gary has been testing some RADIUS changes to improve the way we keep track of everyone’s usage data.

I’ve been contemplating how good it would be to have the noise Super Mario makes when he gets a coin go off every time something works. ‘Supplier select works? *ding*’ (Oh, and writing up the documentation for the email changes Colin made yesterday. That’s a brilliant example of PlusNet at it’s best – fewer than 3 working hours from the idea to having the finished product.)

Paul has been Working on a project for some of our customers. It’ll help users with managing their accounts and let staff be moved to other departments. We hope account managers will find this a useful extra feature.

Nigel has been helping Gavin by doing some regression testing on one of the newly refreshed pods and is also happy that it’s Friday.

Matt B has been the gatekeeper for our rollout process again and has forgotten his music player, meaning he’s had to put up with our crazed ramblings all day.

By the way, there was no Quiet Time today, so the notification is a glass and a storybook with a line through it. Gary’s always saying he’d rather we spent the time having a glass of milk and Kelly reading us a story

[Ed. What she hasn't mentioned is that she's been bugging me to take part in a Spelling Bee competition so I'm being extra careful here to avoid typos!]

We move onto Jason, in Networks now:

Another busy week in Networks this week… When isn’t it!

So what’s been happening……………

More work on dealing with spam email. We have been adding more users to the Postini trial and seeing very good results. The first Postini figures showed we had stoppped 10 million spam emails in one day which reduced the load on the servers by 40% and reduced network traffic on some of our links. Cant wait to see the figures once all our customer base is on the platform!

Network dev continued the good work with the Brightview migration this week and at the same time managed to squeeze good work into other projects like the IWF phase 2 project and ITW migration. For the icing on the cake they managed to put in more resilience on our upstream transit links…

The ticket chappies over in net ops have had a storming week… They managed to CLOSE 320 tickets between them! fantastic effort and well worth a mention. [Ed. Great work team!]

EFS is back with his Product update:

Yipee for Friday! It’s been a very busy week in Products, all of us working on lots of different projects and I think I’m going to need the weekend to recover.

Rich has been working to resolve an issue with Dial ports for MAAF, he’s also continued to work on the VoIP platform; troubleshooting and answering customer queries.

Dave’s continued the BT asset data audit, looking at customers on fixed rate speeds, upgrades to max and tickets.

Shaun’s been working on Churn analysis, usage analysis, MAAF reporting and ad-hoc report requests. He also made money off Nigel by helping him in his keep fit campaign (which Shaun kindly offered to donate to a certain persons “Student Loan” charity……bless him).

Ian’s been working on the Product Matrix, continuing discussion on VoIP migrations and the general Friday tidy-up.

Maria has been working on numerous issues being covered off today from the operational review meetings – resolving a couple of potential risks within the business, re-establishing the churn workshop looking at why a customer may wish to migrate or cancel our service and what can we do to make people want to stay. Amongst a number of other things – the nice bit Maria had to do was officially telling me and Rich that we are out of our probationary period!!

As for me, I’ve been working on an ongoing Homephone issue, continuing to improving Affiliate reports and catching up with some daily reporting that has been creeping up on me.

Darren

Time for Comms now, with Moi.

Somehow I’ve managed to get roped into writing the Comms EoD because Matt and Chris aren’t here, Bob grunted that he was busy and Mand should have gone home but I digress.

I had to work from home this morning after being woken up at 5am by some massive cramp in one of my legs for about ten minutes. when it come to my alarm going off, I discovered that I couldn’t stand up! But I was okay for the afternoon and spent my day handling forum queries, a couple of problems some more account management (which never ends!) and making copious amounts of cups of coffee.

I think we probably know what Bob’s been doing. His entrie day’s been taken up by Postini.

Mand has been dealing with the problem processes internally, handling some home phone queries and helping out the provisioning team. She’s also sent an email to some of our customers about a cosmetic issue we had with some of our invoices.

Chris from Marketing, chirpily reports that:

I’ve spent most of today reviewing our Christmas promotional activities and planning some upcoming press activity. We’ve also prepared an email to be sent next week and continued with the print ad work. We’ve had our end of week meeting and have scared ourselves with how much work we have to do over the next couple of months!

[Ed. Apparently he's a one man team!]

It’s Finance’s turn now, with Alex:

It’s been a busy day in the finance department today but we’ve all got that Friday feeling!

Mark (Bell) has been meeting with BT today to discuss intercompany reconciliations. Kate has been working on remittances, expenses and dealing with Madasafish queries. I (Alex) have been working on direct debit processing and BACS payments. James has been working on month end reconciliations and finally Mark (Jacks) has been dealing with direct debit processing and issues.

Have a lovely weekend

Business Support update today comes from Adam:

A busy day again for the business support team again but its Friday so what they hey! (sorry Paul and Al who are working tomorrow!)

The main focus has been on logged faults and all tickets in those pools have now been touched within the last 72 hours so we’re continuing to pull things back towards a touch every 24 hours.

Personally I have also been dealing with a high number of home phone faults which seem to be mainly caused by extreme weather conditions so are typical for this time of year. Each customer with a home phone fault has had at least 1 call from me today with a detailed update on their issue.

We’ve had plenty of inbound calls today all of which we’ve mananged to answer so we should be in for some very good stats again for today. Everyone else on the team has been working very hard chipping away at the afore mentioned logged faults and other miscelaneous queries from our business clients.

Mick is doing a superb job in his new role as training/QOS agent. We now have 6 new faces on the customer service team taking calls and dealing with customer queries. The other 7 new starters will be embarking on their second week of training next week and all being well they will soon become part of the fold in the CSC and should be dealing with technical queries by the end of next week. All of them seem to be making really good progress.

So, that’s it from me for the week. Lots to do next week and the week after and the week after that….

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