It’s Ali here, with my second stint as Editor. I can only assume that as I didn’t get fired last time, I must have done an OK job! Either that or Pete is getting very desperate…Ho hum and on with today! I’d love to tell you what a warm and sunny spring day it has been here in Sheffield, but I would be lying. I have however had a very interesting day, testing one of our in-house productivity tools.

So, what else has been going on in PlusNet Towers today? Here’s Helen from Development to kick things off. If you don’t like beetroot, look away now…

Hola! Helen here from Dev, I’ve just come back from my holiday in Spain and lots has changed in those 2 weeks. I have been seconded to a different desk to make way for lots of new faces. All the guys from Poland who I interviewed a few weeks ago are making PlusNet and Sheffield their new home for a few weeks as they get to grips with all our systems. Welcome on board guys. It’s really satisfying to see everyone settling in.

The rest of the team have been getting on really well without me. They have been integrating all their clever code together, which means by the end of today we are ready to fully test our project. How exciting! – Who needs managers with such good developers?

Our quarterly Rally is tomorrow. This is where the whole company get together and share what has been happening over the past few months. Today I have been giving my views on who should win awards for outstanding performance. A very difficult decision to make as everyone is passionate about what they do here at PlusNet.

I am in the PlusNet team running ‘Theo’s 10km’ on Sunday in Graves Park to raise money for Sheffield Children’s Hospital. You can sponsor us all. Last night a few of us went training in the hail, putting a whole new meaning to April Showers. It was tough going after a couple of weeks off but I just about managed to keep up with the guys. Wish us all luck for Sunday!

Oh and to make my day complete at PlusNet, beetroot appeared in the salad bar at lunch, it was yummy!

Crikey – that’s quite enough excitement for one day!! Next up it’s Brad from the CSC, who’s keeping up the slightly holiday feel to these introductions!

Aloha from the CSC, today is the 106th day of the year. What have we been taking calls about? Well let’s find out…
1. Connection Setup – Calls regarding setting up their funky new routers or new customers forgetting their username / other details.
2. New Faults – Customers giving us a bell to raise faults on their lines, mostly loss of connection issues.
3. Billing Enquiries – Customers contacting us with regards to their account and any bills that they receive.
4. Fault Updates – With quite a few faults raised we do expect customers to chase us for updates. Most of these updates are provided by us and customers are giving us vital information related to their fault.
5. Email Setup – Calls relating to setting up new email clients or new customers calling to set it up for the first time.

Have a good rest of the day folks.

Now then, what’s been happening in Marketing? Over to Phil for an update…
I was very, very pleased to receive my copy of the MoneySavingExpert newsletter – PlusNet recommended as the best buy! Makes me really proud to see us namechecked by national institutions like this one.

Elsewhere on the hot-desk:
- Martyn and Spence doing some great work on product pages to simplify them down
- I’d love to hear from anyone willing to have a chat about our product pages (either Twitter http://www.twitter.com/philsheard or via the community site)
- Finally – a day off for Chris who is celebrating Liz’s birthday – happy birthday from us Liz

Apologies from the Products team – they are all in an offsite meeting today, so they aren’t able to input… here’s hoping they’ve had a positive and productive day.

Here is what has been going on in the world of Web Dev today with James…
Dan – implementing and tweaking the customer satisfaction survey across the various vISPs.
Duffy – listening to Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell (an excellent choice) and been doing general problem fixing.
Sam – assisting the marketing team with their projects and has been listening to various Weird Al tunes.
Chris – working on general bugs and continuing to re-design the layout of the Community Site.
Colin – working on XML sitemaps and PUGIT items.
Wojtek & Grzegorz – have been in the land of Brightview phase 2 templates.
Jonny – re-wrote the lyrics to ‘Copacabana’ by Barry Manilow to include Colin and posted it on the web, plus he tested some XML sitemaps, and attended several meetings.
Pete – looking at the wizards for Brightview phase 2.
Nick & Mark – email templates for Brightview phase 2.

I’ve been continuing to look at implementing Customer Generated Support Pages on the Community Site. Sorry no quote from us today but I promise there will be one next time! James.

Finally we have Catherine from QA! Hello again from QA. These updates may have got a little rarer but absence makes the heart grow fonder, after all! Today, Matt B has been writing a guide to one of our mock services [no, that's not a service that takes the Mickey out of you, mwaah haa haa haa ... oh I'll get my coat!!! - Ed], Nigel has been working on problems, Gary has been doing more work on the referrals project and I’ve been doing problems and some of my rather neglected personal admin tasks. We’ve also all been doing some more work on the Brightview project, ably assisted by Telephant, the PHP elephant.

Until tomorrow… (don’t worry, we took the picture at lunch )

That’s all for today folks! Have a fantastic evening! Ali.

Bookmark to:

This entry was posted by AliMcGowan on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 5:21 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.