Wow, that week’s gone by fast, seems barely yesterday it was Monday. Are we really half way through August already? Back when I was at school, and we’re going back over 15 years now (I feel old just saying that) the Summer holidays seemed like such a long time, now the years just go by in a flash. Is it just my perspective, 6 weeks as a percentage of a 13 year old’s life is a lot higher than me at 33?

Anyway enough of the pre-amble, let’s get on with the business of the day.

Today we start off with Catherine from QA:

This morning started badly when I carried an over full coffee *so* carefully down two flights of stairs, only to jog my arm and spill some about two feet from my desk, and scald my finger to boot. Then, my headphones broke so there has been no widdly guitar to speed my testing along. What a day! Still, I’ve been learning how to use more of our mock services as part of ensuring our java upgrade goes well which has been really interesting. Gavin has been helping me with this as a bit of a break from his automation work – thanks Gav! Paul has been motoring on with his work on our products tool and learning about the wonderful world of billing. Nigel and Team Awesome are still working on Project Secret Squirrel and Gary has been preparing for another mixed bag of changes which will be rolling out on Monday morning. Have a great weekend, everyone

Next we have Ben from the CSC:

Today hasn’t been too far out of the ordinary with the usual mix for the top 5, so without further ado, here they are…

(1) Router setup
This one is never going to go away until we bring in TR-069! Customers are calling in at every stage of setting up their new hardware, from removing old connections from their computer and configuring DNS details to simply typing in the router’s configuration page into their browser of choice.

(2) New faults
The usual mix of faults have been reported today, intermittent synchronisation and speed taking the lead over authentication. The majority of these faults are resolved with good advice from a CSC Agent, with a minority being pushed through to the faults team to investigate further.

(3) Provisioning updates
Seven to ten days are just too many for our new customers, it seems like we can’t bring them over to Plusnet quick enough! With many new customers trying out broadband or the internet for the first time, they don’t have email or web access to check the progress of their order online, so this generates calls into the CSC.

(4) Fault updates
The number of reported faults is falling, and hence we’re seeing fault updates drop down in our list of call causes. Our SMS system has come into it’s own in keeping customers informed of the progress of their faults, but with only 180 characters to fit into an SMS, we often have to ask customers to call in for a full update.

(5) Username / password verification
There has been no pattern to the reasons behind people calling in for their usernames or passwords, but we have seen enough of these calls to warrant a top 5 position.

Speaking of faults, Adam’s got an update from our Faults Team:

I have mainly been dealing with Home Phone faults and Broadband Fault Escalations.
Keith has been hammering speed faults logged with BT for the entire day as well as ensuring certain faults don’t time out with BT.
Bradders has been slightly obsessed with the whiteboards, to ensure that we are keeping within the response times for all faults.
He has been doing some Retest tickets, and Manager Faults and ensuring we’ve been keeping the quality of service at a high standard.
Steve has been doing No Sync faults already logged with BT, so retesting, checking that the service is working.
Alex has been hammering speed faults and either raising or educating customer with the correct expectations of MaxDSL.
Tom has been dealing with dropping connection issues.
Rich and Pete have been dealing with Auth issues and No Sync issues raised with BT, and one of them will be lucky enough to calling back customers who we couldn’t get in touch with earlier.

The team in general have also been assisting colleagues who have customers calling for fault updates, as well as taking a few calls when it gets busy.

Over now to the Marketing desk and Martyn:

Today’s big news is the launch of a new My Referrals offer. Gavin and Chris have been working hard on this all week and hopefully some of you will be able to go and spread the word.

It’s been a mixed bag for the rest of us. Spencer has been sorting out stationery that uses the new Plusnet branding and I’ve been working on improvements to some of our sales pages. We’ve also been eating cake. Amy’s been on the phone to some of the comparison sites that we work with and Sameer’s spent the day looking into all sorts of web analytics reports. Shailini’s been in loads of meetings and she’s in one now so I can’t even tell you what they’ve been about.

That’s it for the week from us. Enjoy your weekend.

No poetry this week unfortunately, but instead a full end of week report from Jen in HR:

This week, HR have been….

Barbs has been sorting out stuff for people changing roles across the business…including me! She’s also been doing a bit of housekeeping in filestore of our HR documents. As usual, she’s been busy writing our HR reports, too. She’s been sorting out the admin for those staff leaving for pastures new over the next few weeks and organising the pension visit which took place earlier this week. All this on top of lots of bits of admin and managing to squeeze a day off in too!

Gemma has been helping me with the Master Cutler Challenge Raffle and finalising the Absence Workshop. She’s been busy sorting Employee Relations and helped Diane present Absence Analysis for July. She’s also been inputting new data onto our HR system for better reporting.

Diane spent the first day catching up from her holiday and then has been busy putting together the absence analysis and also carried out a review of 121s in the business, including creating a new pro forma.

Amanda presented our Operational Review to the Directors, going through all the exciting stuff we’ve delivered on in the past couple of months. She did mop up sessions for the 360° feedback, had meetings with BT HR and reviewed the lesson plan for the Absence workshops next week.

Meanwhile, I’ve been busy trying to plan for my move into the reception area downstairs, now that my role’s changed to HR Assistant. So, it’s all been picking out colours and deciding where the furniture’s going to go! (Ed: you sound like you’re moving in Jen!)
I’ve also been updating the Values presentation that we created in April and trying to sort out a stack of offsite, transport and accommodation bookings (including the Christmas party). I also managed to sneak off to Ladies’ day at Beverley races and lose more than I won….

Phew…all in a week’s work!

Lastly for today Bob brings us enlightenment from the Comms Team:

Hi, BÅB ‘the bed’ PYLLENBY from the almighty Comms Team here.

Today there’s just been the three of us because JÅMMES ‘the desk’ BJÄYLLI has been on leave.

MÅTRÄK ‘the chair’ TÅILLÅRD has been busy helping the CSC out with the logged faults ticket pools, and been reviewing development change controls.

SFRIS ‘the drawers’ PÄRR has also been tucking into ‘all things faults’ whilst casting his eye over the odd networks changes control.

I’ve mainly been concentrating on problems.

You’re probably wondering what on Earth has happened to our regular psudonyms? Well, you’ve only got the random link of the day to blame for that

Vi ses sénare.

Well that’s it for this week, it might even be a nice weekend. I’m hoping for some sunshine as I fancy either a trip to the seaside or a long bike ride… or both.

Have fun everyone.

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This entry was posted by Dave Tomlinson on Friday, August 15th, 2008 at 8:31 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.