Tonight I am Scrooge, sat here at 17:30 completing our EOD post, while 80% of the rest of the company has been able to leave early to go and get themselves beautiful for our Christmas Party. Bah Humbug?

Rys from Development

It’s been a while since Dev has had something for EOD on the Community Site, and it’s mostly because we yearn for an outlet where the format is more geared up for what we want to say, and how often we want to say it. Apologies for the neglect.

In the interim since we contributed last, we’ve been forging full steam ahead on our revision control and development platform changes, to the point where we’ve started training and we’re thinking about the systems roll out, ops and ongoing plans for their maintenance.

We’re not quite there yet in terms of deployment, but we’ve nailed down almost all process changes and the hardware is in the building for Networks to commission and enable for us. Exciting times.

We also froze the code base recently, to let the platform settle down over the Christmas period, before we thaw in mid-January. It lets us rebase the department and it the development of existing projects, so we’re fresh come thaw time, and we’ll hopefully use the freeze to deploy at least the revision control part of the stuff I’ve talked about upstream.

Hopefully I’ll publish a paper in the early new year that talks about why, what, when, where, how and who, across the two systems.

I’m thinking Rys is muttering about not really beign able to get into any serious nitty gritty in his posts. A yearning for expressing ones ultimate g33kiness I’m wondering? I think I shall hassle him for some more blog content!

Next up, Mrs Claus Jen from Human Resources

Ho ho ho! Okay, it’s not Santa, just Jen from HR, but you could have been mistaken if you’d seen me carrying a sack of presents earlier.

We’ve done Secret Santa today for HR, Finance and Catering. In fact, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas at Plusnet. Paul and Jude served us up a nice Christmassy lunch with roast turkey and cranberry sauce today. No sprouts though, phew!

In between eating mince pies and chocolates, it’s been a busy old week in HR.

I had some time off early this week, so a big thanks to all who pitched in! Since I came back I’ve been preparing for the Plusnet Partnership Group meeting, which was held today. We had some good ideas and it’s great to see that some of the things we discussed last time have produced successful end results.

Amanda has been looking at the holiday entitlement for next year & current situation. Even though we’ve still got 4 months left of this holiday year, she’s busy planning ahead.

Gemma and Amanda have both spent a lot of time looking at responses on the Employee Opinion Survey, so that we can hopefully build on the thoughts and opinions staff put forward.

Gem and Barbs have been advertising the QA Engineer role we have available.
Plus, Gem interviewed for the Credit Control assistant role and offered it to Sally Leigh, congratulations Sally.

We’ve also been working on various bits and pieces from our ‘people framework’ – Barbara has been collecting useful information from role profiles and I have been working on a new People Place to go on Workplace, with Kelly Dorset, so that employees can find all the HR stuff they need in one place

All that’s pretty much left to do is grab out cowboy hats, before we head off to our Wild West themed Christmas party…Yee-ha!

Yeah, Wild West! Plusnet has a habit of making its Parties fancy dress! It makes for some interesting photos to review the next morning!

Jonathan from the Customer Support Teams

Things continue at their usual pace in the support centre, with people looking forwards to the party tonight. Though with some of us having to be in work at 7am there won’t be too much partying happening.

Anyway, today’s top 5 issues from Team B in the CSC are as follows:

1. Router Setup
   Customers calling in for assistance setting up their new Thompsons, or to obtain the settings needed for their new hardware purchased elsewhere.

2. New Faults
   Customers calling in due to faults, an increase in the number of intermittent faults being raised due to the inclement weather.

3. Fault Updates
   Customers with existing faults calling for an update, either because they can’t get online to check or because the faults team haven’t been able to speak to them directly.

4. Prov Updates
   Order updates, people wanting to make sure that their broadband will go active in time for the Christmas break.

5. Username / Password verifications
   Mostly calls from customers who are unsure of their details and are either trying to log into the portal or set their email up and are therefore unable to use the online password reminder system.

Thanks for that Jonathan. Next up is Comms…. oh.. hang on… no Comms entry? Looks like I’m going to have to bail them out:

Here is Kelly adopted into the Comms Team

Tea! Forums! Newsletters!

Tea!! Bob Angry! ‘Port! Tea! More Tea!

uh

On the first day of Commsmas the Comms Team gave to me A big hot mug of tea.
On the second day of Commsmas the Comms Team gave to Bob, two tins of spam.
On the third day of Commsmas the Comms Team gave to Chris, three days off.
On the fourth day of Commsmas the Comms Team gave to us, four “Comms is teh r0×0rz” mugs.
On the fifth day of Commsmas the Comms Team gave to you, 5 Comms peeps.
On the sixth day of Commsmas the Comms Team gave to you, the 6th line of this song.
On the seventh day of Commsmas the Comms Team gave to me seven Pac-Man Christmas treeeees
On the eight day of Commsmas the Comms Team gave to me eight tasty chocs…

Ok.. I think that’s me done

Bookmark to:

This entry was posted by Kelly Dorset on Friday, December 19th, 2008 at 5:45 pm and is tagged with EOD 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.