Just a quick EOD from me today.. I’ve got to hurry off to make a call with the Forum moderators in a bit. More…
The dawning of Plusnet on the telly and we’d like to try a little something, let’s make Plusnet’s debut the highest ever day for traffic on ITVPlayer. More…
Have you ever found yourself looking for help setting up something not covered in our main Help & Support pages? Or maybe you’ve worked out how to use something and think you could help others trying to do the same? A new router or mobile device maybe, or perhaps you’re into web-design?
Hello, and welcome to the Wednesday EOD!
First up, Ali talking about his new role in Business Improvement
Hi there from the Business Improvement team here at Plusnet. I’ve recently moved into this small department from our development department – and I am just finding my feet. My job as BI Manager is to start looking at various customer service centre-related systems and processes and work out where we can make improvements. Some of the improvements will save us time and money, and might do away with unnecessary administration for example, and some of the improvements will deliver a smoother, faster and better customer experience. I’ve already got three projects on the go at the moment, all of which I’ll tell you a little more about in the coming weeks. Until then, wish me luck in learning about our biggest and fast-paced department – our Customer Service Centre!
Next up, Nick from the Web Team
If ever you can sense a vibe of concentration and hard work coming from people in a room, well I think today I’ve felt it on the Dev floor. There’s been lots of beavering away.
So, what have we been looking at today then?
Well Phil says he’s been working on ’stuff’ – mainly concerning a new sign up page. Nice.
Gary has been in a moaning mood today but has also managed to fit in designing a number of templates, along with Sam. (Sam has been designing too…not Gary has re-designed Sam!).
Jonny has been off and away in various meetings all day and lastly I’ve been working on updating a number of support pages and emails.
Anything else? Oh how could I forget?! We’ve all been getting to grips with our brand new revision control system. We’ve just been let loose on this new toy and we’re starting to find our way around and see how it differs from our last system. I think the general opinion from our guys is that it’s a big improvement. It’s a bit of a learning curve, but it’s all good!
ta ta for now.
and finally, Paul from the Faults Team
Lo All! It’s me again!
Thanks again for reading. Not much has changed here on the faults team since my last update. It’s still busy but we are working hard as usual to keep things well under control.
In a change from last week, today saw Rich and Adheel in nice and early with smiles on their faces (maybe) ready to dish out the workloads to those of us to start a little later and who were perhaps a little smilier.
Starting with myself, (it’s my end of day so why shouldn’t I go first). Today has seen me ploughing through the retest pool finding the odd easier issue to help get me through what has turned out to be a very long day!
Early bird Rich spent the day running through our jeopardy tickets with Brad managing to get everything all up to dates. Brad spent a lot of time training folk as is his way this month but still got plenty of faults done too.
The other early bird Adheel has had a day dealing with the ‘Other’ pools handling the phone and escalated faults with a great deal of class and charm and most likely putting everything right for every person he spoke to. That at least was his aim. Well, that and stretching out a 7-2 lead over Rich at pool.
This week has seen the return of big Tony from his recent holiday and boy is he happy to be back! Another year older he finds himself working through the logged speed faults and 21CN faults with all the enthusiasm he had before his birthday! He has recently proven that he can crack a smile when Munky gave him a birthday cake but we are yet to see the smile today.
Leading on nicely to Munky himself. He arrived in style on the scooter a little later than the rest of us at 11ish to enjoy a day dealing with logged no sync faults and speaking to BT. Not heard too much from him today but the works getting done so he must have his head down.
Also in at 11 with Munky was Keith and Tom. Keith was joined by Alex gouging a huge dent in the number of CSC faults we currently have open while Tom focused on the logged intermittent faults ensuring that all bases were covered.
That’s it for the usual suspects. As for my fellow secondees, Craig is off for the day enjoying a deserved break and most likely wishing he was here with us and poor Lee has a virus, hopefully he will be all better by tomorrow.
That’ s about all for us here in the faults team. If you are free this evening I hope you have a good night, don’t drink too much. That said, mine’s a pint!
Get better soon Lee!
Right, that’s it from me.
At Plusnet we want to keep moving forwards and have more people aware of our brand and products. To aid this, we’ll soon be sponsoring the ITV daily London weather.
As you can see there aren’t any big changes to the ‘look and feel’ of Plusnet. The familiar sunny landscape has been given life and we hope that these ‘idents’ will help get our brand and products more widely known.
We’ve been given a fantastic opportunity in the London area to make this happen. The first ident will be seen on the 24th July, if you want a sneak peak take a look below.
Welcome to yet another installment of your daily** End of Day posting. Another miserable July day here in Sheffield as we progress through the “summer” (which was supposed to be a belter but was quite blatantly a bunch of lies).
** Saturdays and Sundays not included.
Hello Readers!
40 years ago, man landed on the moon. Today we’re over the moon as England have taken a 1-0 lead in the Ashes with three tests to go.
That was a tenuous link wasn’t it! – while I try to think of something better, here’s todays sole EOD entry from Mark of the Web Team.
Hi everyone! It’s Mark here, reporting from the little corner of the development team that’s responsible for web development.
What’s today been about? Well, over the weekend we moved to a new code change management platform, called Git. No honest! It really is called Git, and it isn’t a slur against the author, ‘Kernel Linux’ himself, Linus Torvalds. It’s an exciting time (in the same way that moving house is exciting.) The way we all handle any changes we make to web pages, scripts, and code is now done differently. I’ve not had much hands-on experience with Git, but Windows the client I use features a turtle somersaulting through the air when you make a change. That works for me!
Otherwise it’s been business as usual, only a tad busier. Integration of our big project continues successfully. Right now, our QA testing comrades are testing our changes, raising bug tickets when problems are found. So everyones aim, over the next few days, will be to reduce the list of bugs to zero.
Right, back to bug fixing….
Toodle pip
Thank you Mark, and thank you readers!
See you next time!
Happy Friday! My, it’s raining in Sheffield right now. How about for you lot?
First up is Kimberly from the CSC
Kawasdee Ka (people often put the greeting as ‘ola’ or something so that’s Thai for Hello)
CS has recently gone into new shifts, its been a new and exciting change and we all thoroughly enjoying sleeping in on lates… not so great when it cuts into Friday night dancing time though! The day seems to go very quickly with the phone line being quite busy in the evening. The added bonus is that the sandwiches are quite simply divine – Daniele is especially overjoyed about them today!
Both me and Someone Else (who prefers to remain anonymous) are off to desperate destinations tonight, and by strange coincidence both forgot our PJs!
I personally have had copious amounts of caffeine today and perhaps a little too much sugar! Many compliments about my hair as people at Plusnet are lovely! Sadly James Nelson is not such a fan of my fabulous lime green happy trousers
Customer service tickets and calls always make for an eventful day. I find them to be a bit like a lucky dip… Sometimes you get the booby prize of a very challenging one, but mostly its a varied selection of happy things. Especially one customer in particular this week who said I ought to be a supervisor!
Poor Vicky will be all alone on Mon/Tues/Wednesday evening of next week, so make sure you all send her lovely messages to make sure she doesn’t get too lonely without me!
On a Final note… I recently became a Harry Potter fan after never reading the books or seeing the films up till a month ago. Me and Daniele are going to see the new one this weekend (again at different places!) and if anyone tries to ruin it (cos I haven’t read the book) I will sing very loudly so I don’t hear!
James from Comms
So, in what seems to be a recurring theme, it is raining in Sheffield. Again. In July. I managed to get myself thoroughly soaked coming into the office, but did that stop my boundless enthusiasm in responding to queries on the forums? Of course not!
Our esteemed leader, P to the J has been hiding today. Rumours are that he has been in meetings. Bob, angry as ever, has been busy writing an email to send to some customers as well as asking me to do the rest of his job. This I accepted happily as we all know that Bob doesn’t actually do any work.
Chris meanwhile, has spent the day mainly making various caffeine fuelled noises whilst doing *yet more* easy set up router work and making sure that we’re all in a happy place for next week.
Matt continues his work on the faults team – almost a bit like a secondment, but we’re looking forward to him returning to his rightful home next week, whilst Mand has been continuing with her Home Phone and Dev CC work. Andy’s been doing something content related with his big screen and enjoys having his Cadbury’s Creme Egg cup being filled with tea.
That’s it from us. Hopefully we won’t get too wet on the way home!
Arrivederci!
Right, that’s me done for the day. Climbing time!
My penance for not reminding people to supply EODs yesterday and for when I did post it, getting the month wrong, was to be the editor again. Methinks I got off lightly!
James from Comms
It’s been notably quiet on the Comms desk today. Perhaps because Matt is still helping out the faults guys and Mand is on holiday for the day.
I’ve been looking after the forums and dreading a trip to Liverpool on Monday in the hope of managing to get a passport in the 15 days I have left before I’m meant to be on holiday for 16 days! Bob’s been doing all things Tinsley and Chris has been working on Easy Setup again.
We’ll be back tomorrow – we like Fridays.
Next up, Paul from the Faults Team
‘Lo All!
Thanks in advance for reading. It’s a hectic time for us guys on the faults team.
Today’s roles were delegated nice and early by training legend Brad who must have enjoyed handing the Logged Retest pool to a secondee and watching him squirm.
With three figures in Logged No Sync already at 9.00 this is where I have spent my day trying to trim the numbers down like a good secondee should. All being well the pool should be back under 100 before I leave for a night of good old lazy sofa dwelling.
My fellow secondee Lee has been enjoying a day grinding through the Logged Retest pool and feeling the burn of the tricky issues it has to offer. When I say “enjoying” this might not be the most accurate word to use.
The third and final secondee Craig has spent the day at home having earned a day off for his efforts over the last week. You can only really guess what he’s been up to.
Of the other early starters today, trainer Brad has been using his time between training working through some CSC Intermittent faults and answering my barrage of secondee questions like a true legend.
Alex has been handling CSC Speed faults working like a trooper to try and keep on top of the pool that never stops filling up.
As the day has gone on our tiny group of workers has grown with Adheel and Rich strolling in to pick up on the other pools after grabbing a deserved snack from the canteen and Munky revved up for the second half of the day to strengthen the numbers.
Adheel started out covering the Home Phone faults before moving on to Escalated faults and aims to get a few retest tickets done too before his late shift is over.
Fresh back from a recent trip to Edinburgh, Rich has returned to a world of Logged Auth faults and joyous Retests which should keep him occupied for the afternoon.
Last but by no means least is Matt. Spending a week with us on faults is something he seems to be relishing getting through the Intermittent faults like he had never been away from the faults team.
That’s about it for today. Those of you who have the evening off I hope you have a good time whatever you end up doing. Thanks for reading.
John who runs our Network Operations Team has popped in a quick update
Networks have been making progress on our data centre move plans as well as other daily operational work, nothing really to get excited about just business as usual work.
Finally, Arun from our Live Code Support Team, based out in India
Another busy day for the team with both training sessions and problem fixes.
Mithun has been busy with meeting targets for a batch of Email Problem fixes, as well as setting up a local test database for the all the remote teams. Shiraz is breathing a little easier after fixing a borderline P1 problem and also chasing an issue with account configuration. Anees is working on another account change problem, it has been a while since he started digging around in the roots of the account change process. Jinesh is busy investigating a ticket pool problem but hasn’t tracked down the root cause yet.
Myself, I have been (successfully) fighting with unit tests for a ticket pool problem. It has been quite a while, since I touched unit testing!
The team is looking forward to Karol’s visit to India. I’m sure we will benefit from his visit. (Ed: Karol from the UK is heading over to India on Saturday for 2 weeks! Arun hasn’t warned him about the weather yet…)
Right, that’s it from me. Much better today!
Hello everyone! I hope you’d all had a good Wednesday.
I was hoping for a nice full EOD today, but today we’ve had 0 submissions! Yep, 0! I didn’t get the chance to nip around and make sure people remembered, so nothing!
So, I thought I’d tell you a bit of about my day instead. A lot of my day consisted of me trying to get my head around the closing stages of a major project we have running while the usual owner is away on holiday for a couple of days. A great analogy used by our Developer Director was that “we’d landed the plane on the runway, we just need to park it up at the end”. We just need to finish off the few remaining bits and make sure all is working and closes to plan.
I also spent some time with one of our lead developers helping him work through the timing of serveral interconnected projects; an upgrade to our Java platform, improvements to our Faults platform and the data centre move we have coming. They are all connected and we need to make sure we do the bits in the right order! I think it helped having someone asking him dumb questions 
Finally, it was my team meeting today. We spent a good hour going over or plans for the week, how our teams and the platforms are performing and how we could improve them. Time well spent I think!
Right, enough from me. I hope you get a proper EOD tomorrow!
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