That Friday feeling, except for me it’s felt like Thursday all day.  We’ve had some members of the Usergroup with us today which is always nice.  And we learned that we’d been nominated for some awards for the ISPA UK Internet Industry Awards 2008.   ..we’ve got some shiny logos on the www website.

It’s getting late and I’m trying to put this together while reviewing our latest support video.  Take a look at ‘Dealing with Spam‘ – it’s really rather good!

What’s been happening today? Well let’s find out..

I’m going to start the EOD with a rare appearance from Barbara in our HR dept. who is giving us their end of week:

• Amanda attended an offsite development session with the senior members of the Networks Team. They identified the key deliverables for the forthcoming 12 months.
• We had a New Starter on our E-Marketing Team
• Last Saturday we ran another Recruitment Assessment day. The attendees were applicants who had applied via our Careers Web Page, and we have as a result made a number of offers.
• We want to re-identify what the key values of PlusNet are and the way we work; and so are going to be running Values Workshops for all employees soon.

Over to the CSC where we find Jonathan:

Today has been somewhat busier than a usual Friday, due to the problems encountered with the Homepage servers, but the CSC is still answering support requests as swiftly as possible.

Today’s Top 5 issues are:

1. Router Setup – both customers who’ve been with us a while calling to check their router configurations, and new customers calling for assistance getting on-line for the first time.
2. Webspace – still seeing many calls and tickets regarding this, though the Networks team has made a sterling effort at getting the problem resolved and Comms have ensured that everyone has been kept up to date with developments.
3. Email & Spam – calls regarding Spam are starting to drop off, now that many customers are using the Postini trial, and overall the callers have commented on how much of an impact Postini has had on the amount of spam being received.
4. Faults – the usual mix of customers calling in to raise new faults or chasing updates on existing ones. Though due to the faults team being proactive and calling customers as often as possible with updates the latter is in decline.
5. Sales Questions – we’re still seeing an increased number of people calling with questions about the Home Phone services since the recent emails about this. After all, its good to talk, and who better to talk to than your ISP about reducing your phone bills.

All in all a mixed day for the CSC, with some people looking forwards to the weekend, whereas some of us have only just started our weeks, the joys of shift work

Jason In Networks, tell us how it is with the ways of ether and net..

What a week in networks…

A rollercoaster ride with the issues with customer homepages. We had a serious issue during work to move to more stable infrastructure. The issue we had potentially wiped out the entire homepages platform, so networks went to work to get the data back. Many late hours worked, many pizzas eaten and many annoyed other-halves later and it looks like we have managed to get it all back. Fantastic work. True Plusnetters.

Apart from the Homepages issue what else has been going on this week… what? Networks did more? oh yes….. Our networks team have been working on more network optimisation along with more Brightview integration work. Tasks relating to disk usage anomalies were also carried out this week along with the decommissioning of some legacy servers.

Networks have also managed to work on a total of 244 tickets this week…..

We also had a “networks” offsite this week where we discussed priorities and objectives for our department for 2008. 2008 is going to be a very productive year for the networks department.

Newboy Tim in Marketing, what’s it been like for you this very day?..

Well Marketing have been rather busy, from the deployment of our latest HTML Email promoting Broadband Your Way Option 2 to other varied promotional material.

Friday has also brought about the end of my first week as an official PlusNet employee. I hope this ‘EOD’ article will be the first of many, allowing me to spread my profound knowledge of all things factual and pointless.

For those of you who wish to know, my name is Tim Holmes and I was thrown into the Marketing mix as a new Web Designer this Monday, and over the coming months, if not years, I hope to bring you many new and exciting projects.

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank everyone at PlusNet, as you have all made me feel very welcome.

Mand, oh Mand.. give me the hottest Comms goss.. has Matt made you a cup of tea today?

It’s been a busy day here in Comms, with a rare and welcome visit from some of our Usergroup members.

We’ve been filling them in on the latest happenings at PlusNet Towers, along with answering any questions or queries they have regarding the latest issues.

We’ve got some good news regarding restoring websites to customers who are still suffering from Wednesday’s issue.

Today I’ve spent a lot of time working on our internal provisioning processes with our Broadband Operations Team, which will hopefully make us more efficient in serving our customers. I’ve also worked on internally raised problems, shown the Usergroup our ticket process, and finished a couple of tricky single-user problems.

James has spent all day coordinating the Usergroup visit, along with popping in and out of the forums.

Chris has been working on Networks change controls, network problems, and communication regarding the webspace issues earlier in the week.

Bob has been dealing with Postini, and various communications regarding the Spam that continues to affect our customers.

Matt has continued to work on his monster faults blog, which you’ll hear more of soon. He’s also been helping out our CSC colleagues, and manning the forums.

Darren in Products, stop winding up Maria and tell us what you’ve been doing today:

This week seems to have gone very quickly. Today I saw Ian for about 1 minute, and then he was off again, meeting with some of the PlusNet Usergroup.

Rich has been hard at work on the VoIP Platform, developing talks within the business about our fax-to-email options and arranging meetings for supplier visits next week. Shaun’s been working on usage and churn analysis, as well as the company dashboard.

I’ve been mainly working on Hardware stock availability issues which are still yet to be resolved, but we are working hard to find a solution. I’ve also been working on my normal daily/weekly tasks. As a side note my new year’s resolution to eat healthily and get fit is still going strong! (Jaffa cakes?? Do they count as healthy then? – Ed)

Catherine in QA, are you going to write us ‘War and Peace’ again?:

Dear Editor: it’s a two part EOD from QA today as Matt B wrote the top bit and I wrote the second bit about PUG.

For me it’s been one of those days when on paper it looks like you’ve not done a lot when if fact you’ve not stopped all day (yeah yeah – Ed). Just glad it’s Friday! It’s generally been business as usual in QA today. If you’ve read the previous days EODs then you’ll know what we’ve all been busy with so I’ll not bore you with the details again, suffice to say it’s been a very busy week and the weekend has come at just the right time to refresh us all ready for the next week.

Yes, our testing has continued much as previously described. So today I took a break to meet some members of PUG who came in for a look around today. Hello to David, Maurice, Liam, Kitz and Ian! (And hello again Liam ) It was good to meet some of our users in the flesh although I only had time for a flying visit. Perhaps we’ll see each other again at the planned Open Day?

And that’s a wrap.. have a great weekend y’awl.

P-j

(the PlusNet one)

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This entry was posted by Peter Jackson on Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 7:42 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.