Hey! Kelly here, and it’s my first full day back in work after my first cold of the year. More than likely it will also be my only cold of the year though, going on previous records, so I’m glad I got it out of the way!

On with the update.

Catherine from QA
This morning as I walked to work, not even Monday morning, the grey skies or the rain could stop me feeling happy. Why? Because I had a great weekend, I’ve got a lovely new house and all is good with the world. But is everyone so full of the joys of life?

Gary has been fortifying himself for the week ahead with plenty of Nik Naks while he looks at Madasafish ticket paths.

Gavin has been looking after QA Wizard and our testing environment again.

QA Wizard has been playing its ‘woop-woop’ alert today which is at least an amusing way to be alerted to a problem.

Kelly has been catching up after a week off being ill. It’s surprising just how fast those workplace alerts build up so he’s had some housekeeping to do.

Paul has been taking a break from project work to do some of the admin which builds up even if you are here. Cue delegation and everyone suddenly finding they have more tasks!

Matt B has been doing some problems and laying down some challenges. If *anyone* sees him eating junk food in the three weeks before his holiday, we can claim a crisp new £10 from him! Now, where’s my photo of Matt and my copy of The GIMP?

Nigel has been cracking down on some remaining problems in our bug repository, which isn’t one of the most fun parts of QA but needs to be done.

And finally, I’ve been going to all sorts of meetings, handling problems and failing to go to the gym. Oops.

I hope that wasn’t one of your New Years resolutions! Next up is Ian’s update from the CSC
On this, the most depressing day of the year (ed: It is? I’ve been dead cheery today!), we of the CSC are not at all depressed. We are happily working away as always.

• As always at this time of year, there are a larger number of faults than at other times, largely due to the worse weather. Customers have been ringing up to report new faults and run through troubleshooting.
• In relation to the above, there have been many phone calls from customers providing updates on already reported faults and returning calls from our faults team.
• New customers often require assistance setting up their new routers or having problems with their computers setup.
• Both new and old customers have been phoning for assistance with their email client configuration or for assistance configuring mailboxes or Spam filters on our systems.
• A very positive sign for such a dismal day of the year, customers are still calling up our very friendly support teams with sales and technical enquiries regarding our product range.

PJ next from the web team
I have no idea why but the Design team appear to be playing musical chairs today. They’ve all got their headphones on and look industrious enough. But everytime I look over they’re sitting in different places. Weird.

We were almost a man down in Content today as our Nick had problems getting into work with his trainline being flooded out. Three hours it took him, as he bravely battled his way to work with a series of three bus journeys, passing many flooded out fields near Barnsley.

I’ve been planning the week’s activities which include creating a more basic ‘how to set up your email’ video to accompany our new set of videos that we uploaded to YouTube for you to take a look at. Your response has been very positive and clearly this format is proving popular despite the somewhat grainy resolution you get on YouTube.

Colin has been working on the beta Community Site, trying to get the forums to look less ‘anaemic’ he says.

Anaemic? Get it on a diet of broccoli, red meat and red wine says I! Martyn and the Marketing Team update next
So another week starts in team marketing, with Chris particularly happy due to Sheffield Wednesday’s triumph in the Steel City Derby at the weekend. Work-wise, we’ve had a varied day, with everyone beavering away on different projects.

I’ve been writing emails and preparing for the end of the current £30 My Referrals offer, Chris has been working on PR and putting together some reports on recent promotional activity, while Tim and Spencer have been prototyping designs for promotional flyers and a forthcoming mini-site. Tero has been crunching numbers as ever.

Luckily none of us were held up by flooding on the way to work, but some of the team live in Wakefield and could be looking at an interesting journey home…

Darren’s products update next
A very exciting day, more hardware suppliers came to visit and more booked in for tomorrow. Rich, Ian and I had some very good discussions about current and future hardware solutions, the options are looking pretty tasty. I’ve also been working on a hardware stock issue.

Maria’s been working from home, generally catching up with work. She’s also been working on some T&Cs for Products and finally got details of our new account manager within Openreach (YIPEEE).

Shaun’s been working on weekly KPI reporting, churn analysis and a KPI workshop.

Finally, Dave’s been working on usage analysis, account type audit and tickets.

Chris provides the Comms Team update today
Here are the Comms updates from around the team for today:-

James
James has spent half of his day sitting with Comms and the other half with the Products Team. He’s been spending most of his day posting on our various forums along with looking at a few problems. He’s ecstatic to see that the annoying “none found” message on Speed Faults has been removed, but the messaging on these still needs some work.

Matt
Today I have been in forums, retaining customers and going through the CSC problem pool (and anticipating a guitar hero III marathon over the next couple of days) (Ed: You, me and Metallica: One, tomorrow.)

Bob
Bob initially wouldn’t give me a good update about what he has been up to today, so I’ll have a guess at it.
Today Bob has been continuing working on Postini as well as addressing some problems.

Chris
I’ve been keeping up to date with the homepages problem from last week and picking up any final issues floating around from there. I’ve also been going through the problems passing them on to the relevant departments to resolve.

We’ve been Mand-less today so no update from her.

Next up, Mark’s finance update
Everyone has been working hard today in the finance department helping catch up with the build up of work from the weekend.

Kate has been working on payroll which i am sure a few of us are in need of after the christmas period. Myself (Mark) and Jen have been looking after ticket pools which are now looking healthy. Alex has been adding customer cheques and other payments to accounts.

James has been signing cheques and looking at detailed cost analysis. Mark Bell has been planning for the year ahead.

Finally Fiona has been looking after the failed billing side of things.

See you Tuesday

Adam next, apologising for missing Friday’s update
To fill in as we didn’t post an EOD for for Friday (my bad!) Friday was quieter on calls after the problems with Homepages and FTP had subsided and besides that the focus was on logged faults again as we were low on numbers with one agent (Andy) working tickets. TBH its been a pretty similar state of affairs again today and by the looks of things we are within a touch every 72 hours on each pool. If we keep hammering these
we should be up to 48 hours within the next couple of days (or maybe even better!). So with that and calls we should be in for a good day stats-wise.

Testing for the GPRS device I mentioned last week has continued to show pretty poor speeds, infact tested here it only got 44k on the T-mobile network, we have asked the suppliers to send us a vodaphone adapter so fingers crossed that may work our better for us as such a device would be a brilliant contingency as a backup connection for our business broadband customers.

Andy is working retention faults this week and its my week to work the 11-8 late shift so I’ll be covering the last couple of hours of BSC coverage and also for this saturday too.

On a side note I’d like to mention that 3 of us will soon be starting a weight loss drive, lets call them agents X, Y and Z. The commitment is to start loosing 2lbs a week X and Y are starting next week and Z onr or 2 weeks after. Even though the participants want to remain anonymous for now they’ve asked for progress to be included in the EOD so I’ll keep posting regular updates about that on here too!

The final update is from Andy in Development
In the Development department this week some have us have been going over our appraisals and setting our key objectives for this quarter, from last quarter the most relevant aspect to talk about here is an objective that the entire development team got; “Closer to the customer”.

It is extremely rare that us developers get any customer contact, this objective’s aim was to show us how our work affects the customer, get experience of what it’s like on the CSC floor and even answer some customer’s tickets.

The general consensus is that this has really opened our eyes to the business as a whole. We learned about new aspects of the business that we have not touched on in our standard development duties, and perhaps the best bit was seeing how the customer interacts with parts of the system that we have written. Hearing about customers’ gripes is great, as it’s one of our biggest challenges; to see our own systems from the customer’s perspective.

I think this objective was extremely valuable and we have taken a lot back with us into the development department as a result.

Thanks for reading.

–

So, that’s it from me. I you lot are all home and safe from the weather now. I’m home now, with a nice hot cup of tea. Hah. Bet you were wondering when that was going to come into it.

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This entry was posted by Kelly Dorset on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 7:41 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.