End of Day: 9th May

[#1]

Seems to be getting to be fairly regular now that I get to do the Friday end of day. I wonder if it's because I get to work late and everyone else wants to escape to the weekend? Nah, just being a cynic in my old age I think. Well the sooner we start the closer we get to home time... or something like that. First in the line today is Colin with the CSC update: Another warm though not too sunny day. Here's the top 5 from the CSC AM shift today!

1. Faults - Customers calling up for updates on outstanding faults, and to report new faults, lots of customers already aware of the master socket tests and have already done this when they call us.
2. Provisioning - Lots of customers calling for provisioning updates, both for DSL and home phone.
3. Email / Mailboxes - Customers calling for help with the mailbox settings, spam settings and for help setting up email clients.
4. Sales - Quite a few general sales enquiries today, questions about the monthly limits and how the traffic management works have been popular questions recently.
5. Routers - The usual calls regarding router setup, mostly from customers who have got their routers from us.

Next up is Rich with the Products end of day: In products we could do with time standing still for a day or two. After lasts week's frantic efforts to migrate our Broadband Phone base to a new platform we all kind of expected this week to go without a bump - all started well at the beginning of the week then Friday comes along! Luke, our newest member has really started to aclimatise - hes already beating Ian and I at pool (think we needed the healthy competition I was getting bored of beating Ian every lunch time!) and with Darren away hes had some testing times this week and come through them unscathed - well done Luke. Ian has spent most of today playing around with a number of different settings for a Linksys PAP2 VoIP device on behalf of a customer - being so customer focused only makes his day longer but can't help but applaud that type of attitude. Apart from that hes been liaising with BT to get his latest project moving forward with some great leaps achieved today - watch this space, there's some cool stuff on the horizon. I've been busy writing best practises for the day-to-day management of Broadband Phone and generally handing over the opreational management of the service to the Call Centre and Comms Team. It's been a tiring process but the subject matter experts in the CSC are really starting to champion the service and I have no doubts that our Broadband Phone packages will really drive some additional value into our core Broadband products (Gradwell - you're brilliant!). Next week I'll be moving onto a number of other projects (no doubt Ian will throw more at me), fast moving as usual, the way we like it. Which is a good job because we don't have a choice! Barbara has the details of what HR have been up to this week: Of course we all enjoyed our Bank Holiday Monday off; Jennifer has carried hers on, and has been on holiday all week. During the rest of the week, Amanda completed the HR team reviews. She also spent time developing the management and leadership development programme. Diane and Amanda also carried out our first Disciplinary and Grievance workshop to Line Managers. Gemma supported an Assessment Day for CSC recruitment this week. She also went to Leeds for an external workshop. We also spent some time creating new Shift Patterns for CSC on our Ciphr HR System, and still have some work to do on it, but we’re getting there! Kevin's got the Networks team update: As normal a busy week here in networks and here is a potted summary: Security: Hush Hush......Needless to say Jason our Security Manager has been in his words 'beavering' away in the world of security, making more enhancements along the way. Network Operations: Lots going on within this team - the ticketing team have been working hard to clear all ticket pools going into the weekend. Further enhancements have been made to our staging platform to improve the testing of our products. Dunc did some great work and spotted a problem that customers were having with Flickr.......he fixed the issue in quick time receiving a good response from Flickr and from the customers. Lots more problems brought under control and due to this more time being made available for NetOPs to make improvements and enhancements to the platform. Network Dev: Nice work this week in adding more resilience and capacity to our network that has shown immediate benefit and some for the future. Some of these are improvements to our Ellacoya Platform by increasing resilience in the introduction of a new clustered solution, this has resulted in just a more resilient platform but also in performance and throughput.....to the customer this means a quicker update in viewing usage. Also we have made steps forward in improving our backup platform through various enhancements. Getting close to the end now but first let's go over to Martyn from Marketing: Spencer and I have been doing more work today on some prototypes for business pages. I've also been doing a bit of analysis on the success of our broadband usage minisite. Chris has been knee-deep in the cancellation survey as well as doing some more PR work, while Phil had a half-day today because it's his birthday - happy birthday Phil! See you all next week. And last but certainly not least it's Mand with the Comms EOD! Today Chris has been mostly working on our Safesurf trial, starting next week. Bob has been helping out on the forums, and some PUGiT work, along with getting flowers on Flickr for helping with the recent issue we had with uploading. I have been working on problems, and some CSC updates. I've also been clearing out my personal task list, as I do every Friday, only for my line manager to fill it up again every Monday. James was here this morning, allegedly, but spent the afternoon skiving, whilst Matt is enjoying a couple of days off. Right, that's it for another week. For a bit of extra reading have a look at this blog I posted earlier about the impact Grand Theft Auto IV had on our network (biggest two hours for gaming ever) but for now it's back to working on the next blog and doing some number crunching. We'll all be back on Monday when it all starts again. Here's hoping for some good weather for the weekend, I'm hopefully off to sunny Blackpool for a day or maybe two. So enjoy yourselves...