Today has seen me drawing up an SLA (service level agreement) for the provision of Tea and Refreshments (Comms – take note). This is largely because Tony and I (the other project manager with whom I sit) need to buck our ideas up with regards to Brew Rounds.

The problem is thus. I offer to make almost all of the brews all the time. But I take so long to make them that they arrive back approximately one hour later, meaning often Tony’s not there / has fainted due to dehydration / has gone off to another meeting (presumably sulking).

It’s fair to say I could be half way to India to harvest the tea leaves before Tony gets his brew sometimes. That said, it’s the thought that counts, and I think about tea a lot. Now, here’s the difference. When Tony makes me a brew, it arrives back perfectly piping hot within mere seconds. This is absolutely fantastic. Except that the actual act of him getting a Brew Round in is as rare as rocking horse you-know-what.

Anyway, on with the show. You read this and I’ll ponder this SLA of mine…

OK, here’s Jen from HR with their team EOW:

It’s been a tense week in the HR game at here at the PlusNet ground, not least because Gemma’s Euro 2008 team came up against Diane’s in the semi-finals. Holland managed to beat Spain in a nerve-racking knock out before crashing out in the final this afternoon. Amanda put in an early appearance alongside me at the first PNPG meeting before, fittingly, heading off to the BT HR kick-off event.

Meanwhile, our main focus was on the CIPHR transfer, with all members of the team demonstrating outstanding form in inflicting a heavy defeat on the old CIPHR records, ahead of new arrival making its appearance.

PlusNet documentation also came under heavy scrutiny, as the new Employee Handbook is getting prepared to enter the game. There are some changes taking place in the team structure, which meant the Org Charts needed updating and we are awaiting further comment on how this will look early next week.

Clear leaders appeared in the league table, in return of performance reviews, while some people clearly scored an own goal, and now need to show they can come back from their earlier setbacks. Diane’s been trying to finalise some new recruits and keep track of injury time with Absence Management meetings. Finally, the forthcoming season looks like it will present a range of exciting fixtures, as listed in the Learning and Development Calendar.

You think it’s all over….

Thanks Jen! Next up it’s Daniel from Dev:

When you develop a system as complicated as ours, you need to set up your development environment to be as close to live as possible. This is not a trivial task, because in many cases our system talks to outside partners (like BT systems for instance).

During development we cannot allow our untested code to simply ask outside systems to do things. For instance, imagine a situation where we test code that should request cease of the customer service! If this code was executed during development then someone’s customer service would be ceased in real life (grrr).

Luckily, something like this cannot happen. So, what’s very important is that we need to test different scenarios, like for instance failure of outside service. We cannot simply call BT and say:

“Hi guys. How are you? Fine? We are as well. Listen, can you break your service for a while? We need to test a failure scenario in our code ” – no, something like this will never happen.

So what can we do? Well, we can make our code think it is talking to the outside system, when in fact it is talking to our tools that simulate the behaviour of the outside systems. Those tools usually are called mock services. Mock services are used by developers during the code development process and later by QA engineers, during the code testing process.

Today one of my problems to solve was mock services. These did not behave as expected. It turned out my test code was using invalid ssl certificates, which are required during communication.

Now over to Lee in Networks:

It’s been a productive week up in networks (albeit slightly drippy due to a minor leak from the residential space above!).

We’ve had the build of our disaster recovery traffic management database completed on time (final test next week). We’ve also been making great strides in our plans for data centre improvements, and we’ve just been providing some input to BT for the future 21CN broadband developments.

Operationally it’s been all business as usual.

Looking forward to a nice quiet weekend.

Chris has the Marketing update:

Slightly better weather today as we cracked on with a variety of different bits and pieces. Amy has been working with our affiliates all day while Spencer and Brian have been prototyping some website updates. We published the latest instalment of ‘PlusNet in the news’ Link and I’ve been making sure everything is on track for next weekend’s LAN party. I also scored the winning penalty in the Euro 2008 final – Go Team Poland!

Have a good weekend everyone.

Now it’s Matt from Comms:

What a Friday! All end of week type days should be this much fun

Well, I’ll sum up the highlights first. I’ll start with one of the best jabber (instant messaging client that we use) conversation starters I’ve ever had:

(15:24:09) Sugar: Hi Matt

(15:30:50) Me: hello

(15:30:55) Me: ’sugar’

(15:31:09) Me: what will my fiancée think…

(15:31:15) Sugar: I will be with you now

Now I know that Sugar was busy, and hadn’t noticed my replies. She wanted therefore to let me know that she was back at her desk and ready to continue the conversation. This was not the impression I got at the time…

Secondly, Mand had a rather amusing request to test ticket pushing on ‘Gemma’…

Finally (before we get to the actual EOD!) – evil, evil tests. Now, whenever we have to roll a change out to our platform we have to raise a Change Control document. This is checked by a number of departments, of which Comms is one, to ensure that the rollout will not break anything or cause anything otherwise detrimental to happen to the platform. It was stated that no communications were required, and then documented in the ‘Customer Impact’ section was a brief note, hidden away, warning that the rollout would cause a 20 minute outage on the portals, the faults platform and to signups.

As you can imagine, these are fairly important areas to the business. As I read that, a brick landed in my pants. I was down to the dev floor, the question ‘what the f- greasy poop is going on here’ on my lips, faster than you can say ‘good lord, there goes Matt Taylor, he’s moving a tad quickly isn’t he?’.

Yes. Comms is on the ball. We passed. It was a dummy. A test. It was all fine, after I cleaned myself up…

Right. Now that’s out of the way, what have we been doing?

Well Mand and I have been fighting over the work left to us in the absence of Chris and Bob (skivers!) along with the whole problems/meetings activities. James has been with the sales team, looking at some problems, working in forums, meetings, eating McDonalds (lots of McDonalds), sorting out annual objectives and planning for beer o’ clock.

Speaking of which… TO THE PUB!

Have a good weekend everyone.

Finally, we know you’re all dying to see some photos from our internal football championship – here’s Mr Kirkham showing everyone how a goal should be kept:

PlusNet Euro 2008 Championship Final Shootout

What a guy. Thanks everyone. Anyway, back to tea the making. So, yes, Tony and I need to improve. Perhaps next time I am Ed, I can publish some KPIs for you. Right now, I need to do a benchmark, so I’m off to ponder on that. Not sure if uSwitch cover tea making, but perhaps they should.

Brew, anyone?

Cheers, Ali McGowan.

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This entry was posted by AliMcGowan on Friday, June 27th, 2008 at 3:56 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.