Take a look through your gaming connection. Do you have any of the Guitar Hero franchise? Rock Band? Any of the Buzz games, or the Scene It? Games? I do, and yet I consider myself a hardcore gamer yet these are “casual” games. Games that you can pick up and play for 10 minutes or play for hours. Games that are primarily targeted towards people playing together, but who aren’t necessarily bothered to play all the way through to the end. Rewind four or five years, and games like this were few and far between, and the main staple of games are action games, first person shooters and racing games that took months to fully complete. So why the change?
Another week draws to a close and time for a final End of Day of the week that was. Originally Colin was going to do the end of day today, but I think he’s had to run away (leave on time) today so I’ve been roped in to do it in exchange for free beer (thanks Colin)…
So let’s start off first with Barbara and the HR End of Week:
Amanda’s been doing a lot of Departmental communication with regards to both going through results of the Employee Opinion survey along with pay review session with the Leadership team. She’s also been keeping a close eye on company resourcing, and liaising with BT with regards to possible graduate schemes for Sep 2009 and 2010.
Jen’s prepared for the Plusnet Partnership meeting, and has been encouraging everyone to suggest topics to their PNPG member. She’s also been using the calculator to do some benchmark data analysis.
I’ve done a lot of Ciphr maintenance this week… and far too many password changes for forgetful people! I’ve also had an interesting insight into what went on at the MDLP session earlier in the month by trying to make sense of the flip charts produced, for us all to reflect on at a later date…anyway gotta go, got x20 5year olds to entertain at my son’s birthday party! Have good weekend everyone. Barbs
Next please welcome Tom from Provisoning:
Hi I am Tom, this is my first week at Plusnet, my head is bursting with technical and product information that has been crammedinto us all week. Today is my first day in Provisioning where I have been working on Tickets, both Provisioning and Migrations placing and checking the status of orders.
The morning started off slow but I am starting to get the hang of it now. There are 4 other people in the team that started on Monday, so none of us are on our own, we are also being supported by experienced members of staff which has been a great help.
And lastly for today is James from Comms:
Today Bobolage has mainly been loooking at some of the email problems we’ve encountered after closing one of our datacentres at Goswell Road.
Matt’s been doing his handover as he’s off next week as well as working on the newsletters and doing various other bits of task working.
I’ve been looking after our forums and a couple of problems we’ve seen today with referrals.
Curteousy of the floating head, here is todays link of the day.
And don’t forget your latest Commic!
Have a lovely weekend,
James
And that’s all folks. Time to go home, I had intended on leaving on time today but that doesn’t seem to have happened as 2 hours later I’m still here. Still, got some time off next week which will be nice, hopefully the weather’s going to be good too, it’s been quite nice in Sheffield today. Well what I’ve seen out the window.
Anyway catch you all later and have fun.
It’s time for another end of day from was-sunny-earlier-in-Sheffield-but doesn’t-look-so-nice-anymore. Which is typical really as it’s almost time to go home! However, we’re one step closer to a very exciting weekend. Exciting if not only for the fact that the clocks spring to life and jump forward an hour.
A quick one today as I wasn’t clever enough to chivvy many contributions today. Luckily Adam from Business Support was on the ball!
Its been a busy day for business support again today, thankfully not as hectic as yesterday when both Phil and Mark we’re off sick which left us thin on the ground. Both are now better and we are back up to speed and we were able to hit the ground running this morning.
Our main areas of focus for today have simply been keeping the call answer rate as low as possible and to keep ticket responses within the 4 hours SLA.
Going around the team, John has been working across all the ticket pools and answering calls, Chris and Mark have also been doing this along with dealing with a few escalated queries.
Phil and Martin have been focussing on faults, Oli has been working from the failed billing report contacting customers that have failed payments just over a week ago. I have also been working failed billing todayby mainly contacting customers whose direct debit payments have failed. I have also been focussing on trying to catch as many business sales queries as possible from leads passed through from the sales team and also any business retention opportunities.Today’s work should leave us in a better position for tomorrow and the rest of the working week,
Cracking.
What have I been up to today? Mostly presentation writing. It’s nearly the end of Q4 for us (Our year runs April to April) so we need to report all the stuff we’ve been doing and how we’ve done against the targets we set ourselves.
Better get back to it!
Good evening and welcome to EOD!
I’m back at the grindstone after a rather relaxing week off. It’s amazing how quickly you can forget about early mornings when you have a week off work.
Before getting into the meat of the update, happy St Patrick’s day to all our Irish readers! – hope you’re all having a good day.
Over to Comms and here we have Mand…
Howdy,
It’s been a pretty quiet day for me today, as I’ve been working from home, keeping my germs to myself.
James is still on holiday, so I assume he’s been playing video games and/or drinking beer.
Bob and Chris have been helping out with some email issues following the rather large piece of migration work we did on the MAAF platform over the last couple of weeks.
Matt has been in the forums and ‘writing an email’, very cryptic.
I have been working on problems, a plan for an upcoming project, and a few conference calls.
That’s it from us today, more Comm-ic fun for you here
Have a good one,
Mand
Short and sweet today, so Mark’s Web Team musings finish things off nicely…
It’s Mark here, Cead míle fáilte* from the Web Development team! We’re hoping you’re having a great St Patrick’s Day, with lots of dancing, drinking and err… potatoes?
Once again our canteen failed to serve up complimentary pints of Guinness, but we’re not bitter – the Thai Curry was pretty nice. So what in the world of Plusnet web development has been going on today?
Well I’ve been doing email work, prodding some problems with a stick. At lunchtime, I spent about twenty minutes wishing I had Irish roots, my Welsh ones are far less fashionable…
Nick “More email work, problems and work on Partner today for me…in a nutshell (a tiny one, like a hazelnut)”
Dan “Still working on some internal tools.” Thanks Dan, sounds gripping.
Andy “Partner training material, and a small tweak to the Madasafish website that you tested for me Mark”
So I did Andy!
Jonathan “Chewing the cud and general musings, plus some secret things”.
James and Phil are both sealed in a protective cocoon, whilst they complete work on an exciting development that remains hush-hush for the moment, but is going to be available to customers soon. Occasionally I see Phil beating on the walls of the cocoon. I had better get the QA team to drill some air holes.
Sam has been working on visuals for a Partner related project, he’s also borrowed my iPod cable, so I think he’ll be listening to some music too.
Team leader Jonny is in self-imposed exile, apparently it’s too hot in the Development team office. He’s conducting appraisal interviews somewhere within the labyrinth of Plusnet towers.
Kelly “I’ve had to work from home today to look after my poorly girlfriend, but that means I’ve been able to get on with some presentation writing.”
* Cead míle fáilte – translates to ‘A hundred thousand welcomes’. How generous are we?
That’s all folks – see you soon.
On Thursday, at the drop of a hat, I decided that we should all pay £1 for the privilege of wearing a hat (did you see what I did there?) to work on Friday. More…
It’s the second Friday 13th of the year, although sadly no Jason film out this month. Mind you still haven’t seen the latest one yet (and no comments spoiling whodunnit! please).
Anyhow, let’s start off with a sweep of who’s posted today, first is Neil from Networks:
We’ve rounded of what can only be described as a very full week up in Networks. It’s all a bit of a blur but last weekend’s migration of some BrightView vISP’s was a blinging success! Most of the Dev posse have been cleaning up some resulting problems which were inevitable to an extent and putting other random fixes in place. We now look forward to migrating the rest of the vISP’s including Mad As A Fish over tonight, and fingers crossed for another smooth one. Over in Ops we’ve had a huge amount of tickets to plough through due to some mail related problems that we’ve sorted out now. This was almost a one mad effort from Mr Dan P with myself throwing in every spare minute that I could find to back him up.. More DR move work for us including making sure all the guys in South Africa are now using the new Citrix platform to connect to our Network. They’d better be now because I’m disabling the old one on Monday….. We’ve kept all general problems under control too which is a great achievement given the amount we had coming in. More madness next week no doubt!
Neil
Next is Mand from the Comms Team:
It’s Friday. We like Fridays, as the end of Friday is Beer’O'Clock.
Anyhow, there’s only me and PJ left as I write this, so I’m gonna have to wing it somewhat.
Bob’s day was mostly taken up with sending an email to Madasafish customers regarding the email work we’re doing at the moment. It was good though to see the almost unparalleled look of joy on his face when he got his laptop back today (it’s been away being fixed for a few weeks now, and he’s been rather irritated with it’s laptop on a far too frequent basis).
James spent the day going on about his ridiculously long weekend, and working on his plan for world domination (you’ll hear more about that next week).
Matt has been working on our newsletter, some task work, and support for our CSC colleagues. Along with winning an iPOD shuffle with some very very cringeworthy jokes (for charideeeee).
CParr has been holding a JaffaCake vs Chocolate Hobnob debate, and cursing anyone who dares to choose JaffaCake, he really has a problem with them for some strange reason. This is CParr so best not to ask in my experience.
I’ve been catching up from my couple of days off (I like 2 day weeks ), preparing some internal communications and working on problems.
In other news, we raised £107 today by allowing people to pay to wear a hat to work, though PJ’s hat insulted all common decency as it was a Blades hat (it pains me just to write that 
), and the aforementioned joke competition. This will be headed to Comic Relief, as it is of course Red Nose Day.
As an extra special weekend treat, we have not one but two comics for you today:
Enjoy!
And last today, but certainly not least we have Jen from HR:
A bit of a run down of this week, from HR:
Amanda was on holiday Monday and toddled off to watch The Killers in concert. Meanwhile, back at base camp Barbs, Gem and I were up to all sorts of lovely stuff. This week we’ve been focusing on recruitment, including interviewing for roles, plus admin for changes and new starters. Linked into this we’ve also been supporting with resourcing plans. Employee Opinion Survey sessions are next week, so we’ve been setting these up and sending out info to facilitate department plans. Barbs went off on a Excel training course yesterday and we reviewed the holiday policy and sent out updates. We’ve also continued to receive performance reviews and MDLP 360 degree reviews. Of course, today, it being Comic Relief we’ve donned silly hats and felt very conspicuous, but it’s all been for a good cause. None of us managed to get in on the joke competition though, but the post man came from Royal Mail about 15 mins ago and this was his contribution:
‘A young man is getting fed up of going to weddings and being prodded by all the old women in his family, “It’ll be you next”. After a family funeral, they suddenly stop doing it. Might have had something to do with him prodding them and saying, “It’ll be you next”. Anyway, I’ll pop another quid in for that, if only to apologise.
That’s it for another week!
And that’s it for today, but we’ll leave you with the winning joke from Matt T:
Why did the monkey fall out of the tree?
Because it was dead.
Why did the second monkey fall out of the tree?
It was stapled to the first monkey.
Why did the third monkey fall out of the tree?
It thought it was a game.
Hello, good evening and welcome. I hope that’s not trademarked by Sir David Frost, but if it is, sincere apologies Sir Frost! Anyway, it’s been absolutely ages since I did an EOD, so Kelly must be More…
Who remembers the first time that they paid full whack for a console? I had Mega Drives, Master Systems and the like over the years, but they were always when the cost had come down, or bought off a friend or neighbour. The first console that I ever bought at full price was the Sony Playstation, and after my recent blog about the most influential games, I started thinking of the console that I played most of them on. More…
Good Evening Readers! I’m back to my regular Wednesday night slot hopefully and we’ve even arranged Ali to come and be the editor tomorrow!
March is every busier than a normal month for Plusnet. We are approaching the end of our financial year (2008/09) so people are trying to wrap up projects and objectives for their end of year reviews, finishing budget forecasts and business cases and all the sorts of stuff you have to do in time for a businesses new year. This morning I put the finishing touches on a business case detailing the upgrade for one of our core platforms (the one that handles counting all your bits and bytes!) and this afternoon I did the prep work for the End of Year reviews of two of my team members.
What about the rest of Plusnet?
Nick from the CSC
Hello! Midweek at the CSC has been hectic as always, giving us all a good work out here. This was made worse at one point this morning when our phone system had a problem forwarding some calls, causing our queues to get a lot longer for a short while. It smarts a bit when things like this happen – there’s been a huge effort here by all the teams in the CSC to try and get call wait times down and this sort of problem only causes headache.
Still, we’re continuing to get loads of people asking about our new products. It was a big decision to go Unlimited so it’s good to know it’s been embraced so fully. My own account finally switched to Unlimited on Monday so I’ve been trying it out first hand. The Pro package remains popular too, with none of the usage being traffic managed – ideal for gamers (and seeing as I get to do the CSC End of Day today, I feel it’s only fair to get in a shameless plug for a little site that’s proved quite popular here amongst the gamers in the customer support centre)
We’re still having a spot of trouble with emails and account summaries showing the wrong subscription amounts for some customers, but we’re getting it sorted.
Other than that, I suppose lots of this stuff has been happening:
- Sales – It never ends at the moment! Always a good thing, to be honest. There’s almost as many old customers as new calling up.
- Billing – The inevitable aftermath of a change of products. Still just confirming to people what they will be paying, and answering any questions.
- Faults – The usual sort of thing here, nothing too major. No sync faults and authentication seem to be topping the bill, but I’ve also been able to close a few faults today which is always pretty satisfying. One of them had been going on a while and it’s good to finally see it working again. I seem to have got a lot of people with issues browsing some web pages these last few days – it’s quite often an easy fix so a lot of the time you can get those sorted over the phone on the first call in.
- Router set up – Nice and simple really. Not much to report here!
- Provisioning – Lots of you asking for updates no new lines. Seems to be going smoothly, no major problems or delays to report really. Good news as we’ve had a lot more to add recently.
That’s pretty much everything from me today. If you need anything, just give us a bell. We never go home. EVER.”
Nice update Nick!
Last one for today is from… you guessed it Comms
Welcome to a very quiet comms desk. As I write this there is only myself representing Comms here. Peter is probably in a meeting, as it James. Bob and Matt have left for the day and Mand took a couple of days off.
So, onto the festivities.
I’ve been working in excel and am starting to see grid shapes wherever I look. I’ve also helped out with some trickier CSC queries and made the odd venture to the forums.
Matt’s been getting things ready for the newsletter, which should start to be written soon. He’s also been in a couple of forums.
James has been beavering away like normal in the forums, he’s also been on the phone a couple of times today. I don’t think it was the speaking clock.
Bob’s been writing an email to send tomorrow and working through a particularly tricky problem.
So with that I’ll leave you with today’s commic
Have a good evening.
Anyone else out there having a bit of a disturbing over reaction to teh extra “m” in “commic” being used there?
That’s all from me tonight. I’m off climbing!
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