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Hello everyone!

Welcome to your final instalment of the End of Day for this week. We can almost taste the beer already, but before we do, we’ll be sure to let you know what we’ve all been upto over the course of the day.

But! Before I do that, I’d like to draw your attention towards Bob and his blatant disregard to the rules of democracy. In this thread Bob clearly lets everyone know that he wants them to vote for his new random Avatar on the Community Site, but now he says that he’s just going to make his own and use that one.

Bad Bob.

Anyway! Theshow most go on! Let’s start with our weekly HR update from Barbara:

• It’s been our first week since before Christmas, that there’s been a full complement on the HR team. Welcome back Diane! We’ve also had a new addition to the team; Jennifer [Ed. formerly of BOT fame] has joined us, and will act as Executive Assistant to the Directors. Nicola will be leaving next Friday to go on her maternity leave.
• We held our Monthly HR meeting all day Tuesday to enable us to plan implementation of our HR Strategy 2008.
• Amanda was off site Wednesday, developing the training and development strategy; and started planning it’s implementation.
• Our standard offer and contract documents were updated. They are now more concise, and are up to date with all the benefits PlusNet has to offer it’s potential employees.
• The holiday upload for 2008 was carried out, and updates are being made; this is due to be completed next week.

Moving swiftly onwards,we go to Mand from the evil laptop stealing department of Comms:

Welcome to Friday in Comms.

Today has been all about re-learning our security policy (yes that WAS the real reason we hid James’ laptop [Ed. More on this dastardly act in the comments below], and he’s learned his lesson now! :)), discussing Bob’s new avatar and looking forward to the weekend.

None the less we’ve all been working very, very hard.

James has been sat upstairs with our products colleagues again [Ed. Getting coffee made for him by EFS] learning more about their processes. He’s also been dealing with some account management issues, manning the forums and attending team meetings to keep our CSC colleagues informed.

Matt has been working to get a particularly annoying problem through our development process, popping into the forums, and almost completing the Monster Faults Blog (TM). He assures us it’s almost done.

Bob has been working on more Postini issues, and has been working on the spec for our shiny new Service Status Tool. In between times he’s been dipping into the forums and newsgroups.

Chris has been working on Networks change controls, answering queries in the forums, and dealing with his personal tickets and tasks.

I have been working on internal problems, Development change controls, project updates and working on some BT fault feedback.

Have a nice weekend, and we’ll be back on Monday.

Mand

Now to Si, one of our Lead Developers

Today I’ve continued to test the end-to-end life cycle of provisioning a DSL line following some recent changes from Kat S. If that sounds interesting read on…

After signup the automated process kicks off by assigning a static IP address to an account (where appropriate), configuring a realm (the @plusdsl.net bit for most PlusNet customers) then selecting a BT product to provision on based on a BT’s line checker response - for most this will be BT IPStream Max. Once that is done, an XML file is compiled and securely sent to BT Wholesale.

About 5-7 days later, after BT have done their magic, we receive confirmation that the order is complete via BT’s BroadBand Customer Reporting (BBCR) service. Our automated systems then active the DSL component of a customer’s account thereby enabling the customer to connect to the Internet. Unfortunately the process isn’t always that smooth. Orders fail for all sorts of reasons, for example, a phone number not matching up with the supplied postcode or a phone line may already have an active DSL service. In such scenarios the account is flagged to our Broandband Operations Team (BOT) who resolve the issue and allow the order to progress. So that’s provisioning in a nutshell

I’ve also deployed a problem fix for Workplace today, helped out with P1s and MadAsAFish problems and sat in on a CSC team meeting. That’s all from me, have a good weekend, Si.

It’s EFS from Products now:

I’ve been in an extremely good mood today and not even the comms team could make me frown [Ed. Although they had a pretty good go!]. I’ve finally managed to progress with a few hardware issues and had the happy job of informing the CSC that 1800HGs now come with an instruction sheet.

Rich has been working on the VoIP platform, progressing talks with possible future hardware suppliers and while on his lunch he bought some new shoes (he made me stand in the shop and wait while he tried on the 100th pair…)

Dave’s been working through tickets, Ellacoya and BT asset audits, learning MySQL and how to be Shaun (that’s easy……just grumble and rant a bit :D). [Ed. I think you mean a *lot*]

Have a nice weekend.

Darren

Martyn, clearly buoyed by the prospect of beer brings today’s Marketing update:

What a week it’s been. We’ve worked on loads of stuff this week, including new web pages, a newsletter, print ads, promotional emails, affiliate marketing and press releases. Chris has even turned his hand to a bit of technical support, with his blog post explaining the differences between IE6 and IE7. Our new web designer Tim has been getting stuck in and helping us with the workload, as well as continuing to get to grips with our internal processes. I think he’s been here long enough to just be “Tim” now, rather than “our new web designer Tim”.

Next week is looking equally busy, so we’re looking forward to a couple of days off to re-charge our batteries. See you next week.

We move onto Emma from the Customer Support Centre:

Welcome to Team B’s top 5 for the day. Anther fairly busy day which are getting easier with the new starters settling in to their roles. This will reduce how long customers are waiting and the turn around time on the tickets.

1. Email setup/Client Configuration: This as normal is customers wanting us to talk through setting up clients, how to log in to webmail etc.

2. Spam: With the postini trial well underway we are seeing less calls however it is still something that gets dropped in to most conversations and tickets.

3. Router configuration: We help customers setup their routers, ones from us and ones bought from third party suppliers.

4. Hardware chasing: With some being out of stock this is causing some problems with accounts that are active.

5. Fault updates: With the fault team keeping customers well in the loop we are getting less calls, the calls we do get are customers with authentication and no synch issues.

Thanks for reading.

So we move onto Colin and his update from the Web Team.

In the Web Team today, we’ve been continuing with our changes to the Beta Community Site, which we hope has fixed the bugs we were aware of. We’ve also managed to rollout a redesign to our Speed Tester which freshens the look a bit. Our Content Writers have also been busy writing content (would you believe it?) and reviewing some content for a new document they are in the process of producing.

Here comes Catherine with her regular QA slot:

Friday at last! It’s been a long week with a lot of meetings, but a lot of useful stuff has come out of it. The side effect is that so has a lot more work. There’s always a downside, eh?

Today I have been: coming off project work to get stuck into our problem investigation backlog and trying to be healthy.

Gary has been clearing problems from Bugtrak, regression testing our gamma staging platform and and telling us about his hair. Apparently it takes him twenty five minutes in the morning to do his (2 cm long) hair sometimes!

Gavin has been, as ever, working on our testing platform. It takes a lot of looking after!

Paul has been fighting off ninjas. Those sneaky black clad fiends.

Matt R has been The Gatekeeper today and enjoying his morning bacon butty.

Admin has been a bit of a theme today as Matt B has been doing some housekeeping as well.

Nigel has been grinding some more spot checks on accounts. This had better be worth plenty of XP, eh?

We conclude today with Adey, from our Networks team:

Today the team has been working again on resolving problems, solving customer tickets and monitoring of service operations. The key highlights so far are improving our monitoring scripts and checks, developing automation scripts for our software management, resolving an issue with one of our inter-site link, and initial plan for upgrading our internal backup storage. This marks the end of this week while we operate on out-of-hours on-call.
Cheers, Ade.

And so that’s it from me and that’s it from us until Monday. I hope everyone has a cracking weekend doing whatever you may be doing. Bye

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This entry was posted by James on Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 5:50 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 response, or trackback from your own site.