It’s been a typically busy week here in Sheffield and obviously it’s Children in Need today! Not that we need an excuse but we’ve all been getting in the spirit by stuffing our faces with a variety of savory and sugary goods.  Nom Nom Nom… I’ll let this weeks posters tell you more!

First we have Kev reporting from Business Support…

This is written by Kev and I will not mention football or hands. I have been on the business team for 3 weeks on a 4 week secondment and enjoying the different variety of roles you do whilst on this very busy team.

This week has been very busy mainly due to the extremely bad weather over the last 3 – 4 days. This has caused a variety of issues with broadband lines and phone lines which has caused an increase in calls and faults being raised. This has made this week particularly stressful as there just don’t seem to be enough time to do everything.

We have been in a charitable mood today as it is children in need, we have purchased home made cakes and other goodies that other members of staff have cooked, all to raise money for children in need. This does man that the diet goes out the window but it is for a good cause after all.

Well I have to go now to deal with the faults that have been raised.

Kev.

Gemma from HR next.. looks like Jen has a week off EOW duty…

So, its Children in need, cakes have been made and cakes have been eaten. There were even mini pizzas, pigs in blankets and home made bread up for grabs…..yum.

And while all this was going on, Jen was helping to get things sorted for Gavin Patterson’s visit today. Gavin is the CEO of BT retail. He presented a Retail update to everyone this afternoon and held an open Q & A session. Plusnet can be a tough crowd but he kept his cool!

There has also been a lot of work done collating Company information for the Best Companies survey. We may have mentioned this in previous weeks, and yes were still working on it however it’s a micro detail questionnaire and we want Plusnet to be reflected in its true glory.

There was some interesting discussion earlier this week when Therese and I ran a workshop for managers on dealing with difficult situations. We’re running another one next week, so until next week, hope everyone has a lovely weekend.

Gem and the HR team.

Here’s Neil with an update from Networks…

Networks were very very busy this week, we’ve got some cakes to eat/eaten some cakes from the Children in Need cake sale and now it’s the weekend.

Apart from cakes however, We’ve done lots of work this week to try and resolve the problems with network performance, more details on this can be seen on service status and on the priority problem on the website and we’ve been continuing on our plans for network capacity for the next 15 months.

We also been bashing though the usual tickets and problems

Anyways it’s time to go to the pub.

Have a good weekend all.

Last but not least, here’s Orbrey from Com…Digital Care…

It’s been a week of illness in Digital Care this week. Chris, Bob and Andy have been coughing and hacking and sneezing at the desk, and Mand wasn’t feeling too good this afternoon. Likewise I’ve been having hot flushes and feeling dizzy. Thankfully it’s Friday, though it’s sad there’ll be no beer o’ clock today.

It’s a busy time for us at the moment, lots of forum posts to pick up and all sorts of comms to do of both internal and external varieties. It’s been nice to make posters for a change too, and a great way to let the rest of the business know about any changes we’re making.

Not to mention the cake sale for Children in Need today.

I thought I told you not to mention that?

Cheers all. Have a lovely weekend and we’ll see you bright and breezy on Monday morning.

Lovely.. you can see what the impact the bake-off’s had.. EVERYONE mentioned it – that doesn’t even happen in the Summer when we’re all melting!

On the topic of weather, it’s been a typically wet and wintering week here and while I’d normally moan about that I won’t today today as there’s a lot worse going on  further up north in Cumbria.  We saw similar scenes around here a few years ago and I’m sure I speak for all here at Plusnet when I wish those affected well, and hope they can get through the next few weeks safe and well.

That’s all this week folks.

See ya!

Miaow from some black cats and on with the show!!!! First up, Jen in HR:

Once upon a time in Plusnet Land, in the year of Two Thousand and Nine, the thirteenth day of the eleventh month fell on a Friday. Folklore around these parts tells of very strange happenings upon this day. Indeed, the HR team can atest to this.
All day, strange noises have been interrupting out attempts to complete our Best Companies application. Icy breezes have been fluttering the pages of our new starter documents. Gremlins have been interfering with our computers and old references we typed months ago have been spluttered out of the printer. Numbers were appearing where they shouldn’t be on spreadsheets and no-one seemed to know why *cough*. If you do dare to step out upon this eve…take care! After all, it is Friday the Thirteenth!

Next up, it’s me!

I tried to reverse delegate this update back up to my manager, but he cleverly convinced me that I was definitely best placed to write the Business Improvement team update. I think that’s why he’s in charge.

Anyway, this week I’ve picked up a couple of new areas. One biggy is knowledge management. Might sound dull, but actually, good knowledge management is key to helping our business grow – and making sure we deliver excellent customer service. I’ll be spending time over the next few months working on a strategy and helping deliver a solution that means all our Plusnet knowledge is held in an easy to use, easy to access format and of course is up to date.

I’m also going to pick up reporting around ‘one contact resolution’. This term is all about us, more than ever, trying to resolve customer issues first time round. If you only have to contact us once, or we only have to contact you once, you get a better service and we are able to run a more efficient business – which again, ultimately benefits you, our customer. Clearly we won’t be able to fix every single issue with just one call or ticket, but by carefully monitoring where we are up to and challenging the status quo, we’ll know where to focus on to reduce the amount of contacts a customer has to make.

This ties nicely into some work that James K is doing around our provisioning process (i.e. setting up new broadband/home phone for customers), to improve the automation and improve the speed at which we can supply new services. He’s working closely with the Dev team to improve processes that are not fully automated or simply take too long. It’s a huge piece of work but we’re already seeing improvements. Good effort!

Up next is Mand in Digital Care (nee Comms):

Today (and forever more, sob) we’re a man down, as James has now officially left the building. We said goodbye to him in traditional Comms style yesterday (click here) and today many will be saying goodbye to him in traditional Plusnet style, that is to say, at the pub.

Today was otherwise filled with taunting our boss with sausage rolls (when we weren’t convincing everyone they were in fact apples), Matt placing orders, Bob and me going ‘raaaaaaaaa’, Chris scaping the debate, and Andy going down the only road he’s ever known. Apparently. (According to Andy, it’s this road)

The rest of the week was filled with happiness and joy. Or possibly bitterness and anger. I don’t know, as I spent most of it not here. I’m fairly sure it would have involved laughing at Bob, copious amounts of coffee, frogs-in-blenders*, whining, SQL errors, and darkness.

*at no point was a frog actually put in a blender.

Well, that’s good news, Mand! Next we have Andy in the Consumer team:

Consumer team returned to full strength this week, much to the relief of the head honcho who had been quietly going mad over the course of the last week or so. Unfortunately for Chris he has been plunged back into a world of Jimmy Choos and Lady GaGa, so he’s ready for another week off already!

In terms of actual work, we’ve been exceptionally busy directing the Crayola team with some large-scale colouring in, as well as working closely with our delightful Web Team, who’ve worked very hard putting together a plethora of lovely looking webby things for us. In the midst of all that, the tyrannical trio have been Taxed trying to Add Value, and look set to be for some time. Busy, busy times indeed.

Finally, and no means leastly (err, that’s not even a word!), it’s Nick in Faults, back with us after a rather nice trip abroad:

Howdy all! Good to be back in the UK after a fun packed 10 day trip to Vegas – although the cold/jetlag combination is not the greatest feeling in the world… I’ve been switching between dog tired and incredibly hyper. Add to that it’s Friday 13th and I’m definitely feeling strange today

So back into faults! Got back in and picked up where I left off with those faults which have been ongoing for a while – and was pleased to see there was only one customer still without internet when I got back, it bodes well for the week!

Things are going well with our new team member Craig, too. He’s one of the most experienced agents from the tech teams and to be honest has been spending a lot of time doing faults these last few months anyway. Although he does keep beating me at pool, which really has to stop.

Faults wise, it’s pretty much been business as usual, trying to keep on top of the intermittent connection faults is the biggest challenge as always, but we’re getting there. I’ve been handling escalations all week, trying to keep people in the loop and generally trying to tie up long standing faults. I’ve also been looking through our satisfaction survey feedback (thanks to all of you who fill those out – they really do help) and while it’s generally very positive, I’ve taken your suggestions for improvement and passed them onto management to hash out the details of what we need to do better. All in the name of progress!

Not enjoying this getting-dark-at-4pm rubbish. What’s that all about? Seriously, it’s not on. Roll on the Spring!

Thank you, everyone. And I TOTALLY agree with Nick about darkness. Rubbish!!! All that remains for me to do is not get run over on the way home (or to the pub, to meet Mr Bailey) and wish you all a fantastic weekend!

Ali McGowan

Remember remember the 6th of November, because it’s the day that system problems prevented Andrew from posting when he wanted to earlier resulting in it being done much later than he originally planned!

Never mind.. on with the show as they say and firstly while you can always rely on HR, we’ve decided to give them a week off so we’ll instead start with Rowan from the Durban branch of the CSC…

Hi all,

Well… THEY PICKED ME to complete the end of week post on behalf of the CSC SA. Yippee… I haven’t done this in a while so please bear with me.

This has been a great week thus far and the weather has been ‘oh so nice’ to run off to the beach. This has been quiet a busy week for the Customer Services Team, the guys have worked really hard pushing out those tickets and answering those calls daily but making sure that it’s done in a fun jovial environment. I’m really proud of all the guys on the floor for pulling together and meeting our SLA’s and Key Performance Indicators so a big up to the team. Sadly, Preeshan our new Customer Service Manager was out on his own this week whilst the others were on study leave. Luckily Sameer, Dev and Ronel (The other Customer Service Team Leader’s) were on hand to assist him with the workload.

This weekend’s going to be really great after a long hard week so we are all really looking forward to it. Lastly, not forgetting our guest from Sheffield, Brad who is here on a training mission and strangely enough is turning a bright pink color due to the famous Durban sun!!

Anyway, that’s it for me. Cheers all.

Be cool stay safe and sooner than you realise, it’ll be Christmas already!!!

Rowan (on behalf of the SA Customer service team)

Sun? What is this Sun you speak of Rowan?  Nothing but rain and more rain in Sheffield this week, I am officially jealous!

Here’s Duffy with a quick update from an unusually quiet Web Team…

Afternoon all, Duffy here. Another busy week for the team, though we’re down a couple of bodies today, Sam being off and Nick being poorly. Get well soon!

Gary has been busily mocking up, erm, mockups. Jonny has been getting into his new role as receptionist – hopefully he’ll have a better appreciation of what the regulars have to do (hopefully his tache growing exploits are amusing the vistors to Plusnet towers, it’s only been a few days so it might be too soon – ed).

I’m trying to learn more XHTML/CSS skills so I can use crayons as well as pencils in my day-to-day job. Nick was doing some project work and we’re working on getting problem management moved from me to him.

And Phill, well, Phill once again… *tumbleweed*

I shall see if we can get some charity tache action up in a blog sometime soon, no promises at this stage.. perhaps if we make enough noise about it?

Moving on and here’s Tommo with an update from Networks…

Ah, the End of Week, and coincidentally it’s the end another week. It’s dark and miserable out so must be getting near to Christmas. So what’s been happening in the world of networks.

Unfortunately I only got the nudge to draft something for the end of week after hometime ticked around so I will have to be a bit briefer about the network activities this week.

There’s been lots of work going off to resolve the speed and performance issues that some of our customers have been seeing, we’ve seen some steady improvements through the week but there’s still more work to be done as we evaluate the success of each change.

Our migration of customers from our LLU network is almost complete, the last of the customers were migrated this week and we are now just in the mop up phase before final decommission.

And that’s all from us for this week, have a great weekend, enjoy the fireworks…

And last but by no means least, here’s Matt with the goings on from the land of Comms Analog Hate Digital Care…

Hi, everybody! I’m not Dr. Nick. Sorry for any disappointment.

Well, the week in Comms. We’ve had a few people off this week – Poor Chris has hurt his foot, and Pete’s been training. As ever we remain resolute in the face of such adversity.

Well, there’s been a fair old bit of work relating to 21CN (that’s the new up to 20Mb broadband) and as ever a lot of forum work. We’ve also (well, mainly Bob, but the rest of us too) been helping out where we can with the network too and are happy to report it’s behaving much better. We’ll keep you posted via the forums and of course the service status feed.

Not much more to report and as it’s Friday and beer o’clock it’s time for the off.

Thanks all.

That’s it for today!  Ta-ta and toodle pip.

It’s been a nice week off (cheers Kelly) but I’m back in the chair again for this weeks End of Week posting.

It’s been a hectic day (and week come to think of it) for me personally, lots of stuff published and lots of things to keep tabs on.

I’ll come back to that in a minute as Carrie from the Sales team wants to post!

Hi Everyone Its Halloween!!!!!

What a busy week we’ve had in the sales team. Its been a challenge with the amount of calls and with the BT/Manpower guys gone we’ve had to work even harder to make sure where taking every call that comes in, also everyone has had to work harder to finish sign up no macs and contact sales as we have had a big increase on these. Also a few of us have been trained on COT which has been really good to learn a different job and the COT guys have been really helpful on when we’ve asked them questions and also they’ve worked hard to increase the conversion rate on retains which have been fantastic.
We are so glad its friday, a weekend of rest, well for some of us and where expecting to have a really busy week again next week which is so exciting to sign up more customers.

Have a great weekend and don’t scare too many people.

It’s Haloween? I completely forgot! – I’ll have to keep an eye out for the hordes of dressed up students that will no doubt be flooding the streets and bars around my home right now..

On with the show and as somebody famous once said, you can always rely on HR, take it away Jen…

Haven’t done an acrostic for a while so here goes…
All of us have had a busy week
Loads of recruitment activity has been happening
Levels for performance reviews have been submitted
Of course it was Laura’s birthday on Monday, belated wishes!
We set up the Company Induction for Monday
Employee relations has been taking up Gemma’s time
Employee engagement has been taking up mine, trying to get all our company information submitted to Best Companies
Now it’s the weekend, phew. Nearly witching hour!! WHooooooo.

How on earth could I forget about Halloween? Never mind.

Right, back to me to finish off.  I think PJ was going to mention this in last weeks post but he forgot! – We’ve launched a new Windows 7 support section, take a look! We’ll be expanding it as time and needs dictate and we’ve already started this with our Windows 7 shortcut keys guide over in the Community Library!  Keep your eyes peeled for more to come.

Also there’s been a few of you worried about Wireless Security following last nights Watchdog.  We’ve updated our guide on Wi-Fi security in response to this, read Chris’s blog to find out more.

That’s all there’s time for today, see you next week!

It’s the end of another working week here in Plusnet Towers, a little later than planned and I’m now on a double brace! I’ve been quite busy and not really had the chance to arrange anyone for today but I promise there’ll be a different editor next week!

On with the show then, it’ll be a quick one this week I think.  First we have Rohan from the CSC…

What can I say, its been a great week for the Provisioning Department, and all thanks are due to Karen the Faults and Provisioning Service Delivery Manager who has done a awesome job at creating all the new processes that has made the Prov department shine in the lime light once again. Hats off to this great team that never gives up on any task assigned to them and always makes working with them a pleasure.

and finally Jen from HR, who was drafted in to do this at the last minute after a rota mix-up!

It’s quite amusing that I’m writing this as I’ve only been in today. However I believe the rest of the team have been doing an upgrade to our HR system with help from Jamie in IT.

This means that all day we’ve been getting messages along the lines of:

‘can u reset my ciphr password pls or do i need to raise a task?’

(Yes, you know who you are…)

Amongst other stuff we also had a team meeting today and I did a very interesting update on employment law (well I thought it was very interesting, anyway). We’ve also been updating our people plan, where we decide what we’re going to be working on for the next few months. Watch this space for more….

As well as this, we had new starters on Monday so they were inducted. Planning for Health and Safety week has continued – I don’t think this has escaped the notice of a single person in the building. Oh, and of course, it’s that time in the quarter when we collate everyone’s performance review ratings. We’re still in the dark about what we all actually got though for now.

That’ll be all from me…..

Cheers Jen! – I dunno what we’d do without you.

And thats your lot I’m afraid… see you soon!

Today marks the day that I complete an EOW hat-trick!  Ali was down to edit today but unfortunately he’s off ill so I’ve had to step in.

I was actually going to do the Comms team update so I suppose I’ll start with.. Me!

Interesting… not often I get to quote myself!

The team have been super busy as always, mainly with this – if not the eating then the constant procession of people wanting a sample for themselves..

Ta ta!

A shoddy short update from me there, I think I just wanted to show off about the stash!

Let’s get things back on track, here’s Carl from Networks…

We’ve been working on the migration into our new Primary data center that should be complete by mid-November. This week we have moved a number of databases, moved over to brand new hardware for our usage accounting/charging platform known as CBC, moved some internal servers and been preparing for the email storage move that starts from 11pm tonight till 11pm Saturday night.

We’ve also been working on our long term solutions for Internet Transit, Wholesale broadband capacity and email storage.

Next it’s the ever reliable Jen from HR…

It’s that time in the quarter when we should have all had our performance reviews. In HR, we’ve been reminding all the managers that we need the ratings back by the end of today. We’ve also been creating reports on what everyone has been up to over the last three months from their employee records on our HR system.

On the resourcing front, it’s been all the usual stuff, such as recruitment, plus updating role profiles and the organisation charts.

The most exciting thing we’ve been doing though, is the Healthy Workplaces Week for 19th-26th October and preparations are nearly finalised. So, be prepared to stop smoking, start exercising and get eating your 5-a-day. Maybe HR could start by setting an example….(not naming any names!!).

Anyway, I’ll keep it brief. It is Friday afternoon after all. Enjoy the weekend!

And finally, Vershan from the CSC…

From the Faults guys in Sunny SA we would like to firstly congratulate Preeshan Reddy on his new role as Service Delivery Manager. Well done!!! It has been a relatively uneventful week for the team. Faults volumes have been steady while we have noticed an increase in the number of customers reporting speed problems which are related to VP issues. These issues are currently under control and are been investigated by our suppliers.

In a Nut shell everything has been under control thus far and we are looking forward towards an awesome week ahead.

Excellent, I think that’s all for now.

See you soon!

So many times, it happens too fast
You change your passion for glory
Don’t lose your grip on the dreams of the past
You must fight just to keep them alive…

Oh yes! We’ve all gone Prizefighter mad here at work today… why?  I’m sure you know by now but in case you don’t, Carl ‘The Fridge’ Baker (one of our CSC managers) is fighting Danny Williams in the Prizefighter tournament on Sky tonight!

So without further ado, let’s get on with the posts, Here’s Barbara with the HR update:

Another busy week in HR. As it’s the beginning of October we’ve completed our KPI’s , and we’ve started the ball rolling on the Q2 Performance Levelling process; we’ve even had our own Q2 1-2-1’s (just in case you thought we didn’t make ourselves do it – we do!).

We’ve also been busy with more recruitment activities including interviews and updating Org Charts.

Looking forward we’ve been making plans for the ‘Healthy Workplace Week’ and as a complete co-incidence around 12.5% of us took advantage of having an annual flu jab….so no tapping people’s arms trying to hurt them!

Honestly we’ve all gone Boxing mad, really!  Maybe Rob from CSC will prove me right…

Hi This is Rob From the House Moves Team

Another week has flown by and another weekend is upon us in the Sheffield office.

We have had a busy week this week. We’ve had a few people off so we have had to work doubly hard to keep up with the work, but we pulled together and managed really well.

I’d like to take this time as well to welcome back our Song of the week – which this week is Chipmunk – Oopsie Daisy. As per request of David, we think the Alice in chains new album Deserves a honourable mention as well.

There is a massive occasion tonight that we are all looking forward to.
One of our managers is fighting in the Prizefighter Boxing Tournament his name is Carl “The Fridge” Baker and we are all a 100% behind him. COME ON CARL!!!!

There we go, just slipped it in at the end…sneaky! Lets see if James can keep it going through the Comms update…

There’s been a few odd things happening over the last week. England won their 3 ODI game in a row (thrashing the useless South African’s) before redelivering their usual form against New Zealand and (dare I say it) Australia. One of our colleagues is off to fight in a big Boxing Match on Sky!

It’s been a pretty busy week for me – I’ve been keeping my eyes on our forums as well as picking up some various other bits of work, which included mapping out our Help Assistant in Excel (don’t try this at home – it’s horrible) for our Business Improvement team so that they can easily identify some improvements we can make to it so our customers find it easier to get the information they need when looking to raise a ticket.

Bob’s basically been himself. Grumpy. Angry. Bald. He’s also been doing a lot of work on our ongoing datacentre move and looking after Network Change Controls.

I would ask Matt and Mand what they’ve been upto, but Matt’s on a half day and Mand is ill (1, 2, 3 awwwwwww). They’ve been helping out in the forums and doing various bits of task work when they’ve been in though.

Chris came back to work today (yay!) after a relaxing break. He tells me he’s done absolutely nothing with his time off, which is how all holidays should be spent. He’s been catching up today and seeing how various projects have been going on.

That’s it from me today. Don’t forget to tune into Prizefighter tonight at 9pm on Sky Sports.

Have a nice weekend mo

Nicely done sir!  Right then, last but not least is Ali, from the Business Improvements team.

Here’s Ali McG from Business Improvement.

OK – I’ve got a few updates today! First, Luke’s on hol today – the lucky beggar had yesterday off, too, so he’s enjoying a nice long weekend. But earlier this week he had plenty of supplier conference calls and is in the thick of a big project to research billing and customer services contacts, as these form the biggest areas we have from our customers, whether it’s through tickets raised on the portal or phone calls.

Maria, who’s Head of Business Improvement, had a huge workshop on Monday with BT up in Newcastle, to run through where we are with ADSL2+.This exciting technology will, as you may know, eventually deliver much faster broadband speeds than we typically receive today. I’ve just had my staff account switched onto BT’s 21st Century Network, so once it stabilises I’ll let you know if I’m getting more than the 4 meg I’ve been used to.

Nick is coming to the end of his trip to our Durban call centre and whilst there he’s been doing all sorts of useful things. He has sent me a nice long list, which includes the quality acceleration plan roll out, call quality meetings, meeting with team leaders and quality managers to cascade the September Plusnet rally, he attended the weekly performance meeting and weekly internal ops meeting. He also spent a full day monitoring customer calls, a half day monitoring ticket responses and meeting with another client of the same call centre to discuss common themes. Oh and as if that was not enough, met with the Board of the call centre for lunch – perhaps to wind down from so many activities!! Just when I thought that was it, Nick sent another Jabber! He’s been meeting to discuss performance incentive ideas, and done prep and planning for the provisioning and fault trainers visiting the Durban operation in the next two months (that’s if our very own Carl Baker doesn’t win his fight tonight!!!). I actually need to lie down now I’ve typed that up.

For me, I’ve spent this week on one strategic area and also plenty of smaller things. My main focus has been looking at any quick improvements we can make to our existing phone system (the one that you, our customers call in on) – so have had plenty of emails to write and reply to, working with our suppliers. It looks like something is going to be possible, so next for me is finding out the costs and lead times involved and making sure there’s a business case for making the improvements – all of which will lead to better customer service.

With the London Campaign in full swing, I’ve also been listening in to sales calls, to help the team. I’ve been providing feedback on call quality and areas for improvement; I’ve also been noting where we’ve done a good job. My feedback will help the sales guys and will also be useful for new recruits.

We’ve also been getting quite a few wrong calls through to the sales guys, so I’ve been working with people to see how we can direct more customers to the right customer support staff, first time, and avoid having to transfer customers about.

Cheers Ali!

That’s all for this week, I’ve just got time for one last GOOD LUCK CARL – best wishes from all at Plusnet!

It’s the end of another week here in overcast Sheffield, I’ll get straight to the nitty gritty and pass you over to Lenny in South Africa…

Hi

End of the Week….. mmmmm…..what’s that ? Just kidding, if anything it’s been wild. You must excuse me; I am still recovering from having had to be at the office on a Public Holiday. Yip, SA celebrated “Heritage Day” yesterday. Okay Okay, I should stop saying that…… a few years back some young aspiring dude, nah not me, decided to call it “National Braai Day”, unofficially off course. So dis pap en vleis alles rond en almal is baie gelukig. (ed: does anyone care to tell me what that means? )

Nick came down to visit the team this week and to him it feels like he never left home. He must have had extra space in his luggage; the dude brought grey clouds and rain with. Durb’s has never been that cold, misty or rainy; we can’t even see the building next door, lol. No seriously, it’s always great to have Nick down, huge inspiration to the team. As for me, well it’s very comforting to play a round of golf with someone who losses just as many balls per hole.

Leaving out the dreary weather and my surf board that’s accumulating spider webs, it has been quite a positive week for the TS. Sat results came through and by departmental breakdown we have seen quite rosy figures for the Techies. We achieved green rag on overall contact handling, and even better reviews on the agents dealing with each case. We also rolled out a Madasafish Cust Sat incentive at the beginning of the month. Basically each time a customer rates our service very good/ excellent, the agent responsible wins a little prize. Tech raked a total of 82% of all prizes to date. There are still a few grey areas, as it relates to feedback on DSL faults, but the positive spin off has geared up the team to persevere.

We are all planning for exciting times to follow; new training programmes have been facilitated to upskill Tech in CSC Billing and Failed Billing. Tech is quite eager to pick up the ticket volumes, and spruce up the ET for a change.

We have been expecting an increase in call volumes in August but haven’t seen a very noticeable spike. Probably a godsend, we have staff in training and can’t wait for them to hit the floor. Or perhaps the magic of our new routers could be doing the trick. The team has been collecting data to measure the impact on CSC. It may be a bit early to determine the actual effect, but we are all pretty hopeful.

We are already receiving few calls on Snow Leopard, and the staff have updated their wish lists saying, “Please can we have a VD for Mac X.6?”

The team did great this week, working to piece together positive KPMs, especially the internal shrinkages, and with the trainees about to go live, we are sure to get a better handle on the Longest Waits and a few more % for the JLP SLA. More good news this week, one of our own, Preeshan Reddy was recently appointed as the Customer Service Manager. We are all really proud of Preeshan and his achievement and wish him well in his new role.

Carl Baker, we are in your corner 120%, knock his lights out dude!! (ed: Carl’s a manager here in Sheffield and he’ll be taking part in the latest Prize Fighter Tournament on Sky Sports next week!)

Well, that’s a wrap for the week then, looking forward to an equally exciting week to follow and more ICC champion’s trophy games. So until next time, like Renault’s Nelson Piquet Jr, I’m out’a here !!

Wow, I need to catch my breath after that.  I’ll let Mand continue with the Comms update..

Comms

Bob’s been working on ‘blah blah, something ’bout networks, blah blah’. He also spent some time in Usenet, and on some project work, along with handling the recent Frontpage decommissioning stuff.

Matt’s continued his beard growing, and decided that everyone should have a beard (erm, logistical problem there, for me at least ). He also worked on some project work, some clean up for recent billing problems, and has been on call (which means he gets to leave early the lucky devil).

Chris and I have been writing some training, and some content for an upcoming project (more on that in a few weeks).

James was kind enough to send me his activities via our IM client, meaning I don’t even have to talk to him (we’re all about efficiency here) so here it is in all it’s glory:
(4:40:14 PM) James Bailey: help assistant
(4:40:16 PM) James Bailey: forums
(4:40:18 PM) James Bailey: pms (lots)
(4:40:20 PM) James Bailey: twitter
(4:40:23 PM) James Bailey: adsl2+ faults

Best not to ask ’bout the pms I feel. 

Andy has been working on some updates to My Account which rolled live on Thursday, so you may have noticed that it’s all pretty and pink now like the rest of the site. He also worked on some updates for our router setup guide.

Have a good weekend, and we’ll see you same place, same time next week.

Mand

I’ve been promised an update from the Web Team, but it’s not there yet… I’ll give them a few more minutes….

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Here we are! Off you go Gary!

This week the Web Development team have been embroiled in an undercover Mafia bust operation.

Well, the operation that I was involved in was run by an individual named Jonathan “Donato the Bear” Defries, who at the time was the underboss of the Jonny “Cosimo Porkchop” Wing family, and it was a Wing family operation that had various members throughout the ground floor involved in taking the designs and codes and then turning them in to Wing and other individuals that were the upper echelon of the family, and they were running it. Now, how they operated from there, I cannot answer that.

Sam “Blind Tony Bruno” Weaving, and myself; have been busy laying low on the secret project, Little Nicky “Trapdoor Valentino” Bower has been relating information on our undercover operations back to the guys at the agency via coded support section updates. A fellow agent, Phil “Shaky Carlo Gallo” Swaine has been undercover too long and is having trouble adjusting back to the straight life, he’s been busy reviewing previous work and making general improvements for our partners.

Meanwhile the Capo di tutti Capi, Jonny “Cosimo Porkchop” Wing, is nowhere to be found, he’s fled the area in fear of being whacked for allowing his organisation to be infiltrated, some say he’s ran off up a hill in the Peaks, capiche?

Ciao.

Gary “Marco Leatherchest” Rockett

Hmmm…I suppose thats better than referencing Days of Thunder!

That’s all we have for this week, see you next time!

Andy was asking for volunteers to edit the end of week earlier in thwe week and I foolishly volunteered – so here I am.  Let’s get this party started.

Gemma! What’s been going on in the HR Team?

Things changed a little within the HR team this week.

Jen started her studies at Sheffield Hallam and so has only been in on Thursday and Friday. Laura has completed her first permanent week in the team job sharing with Jen (and is now sunning her self in Valencia). I attended a Best Companies workshop in Manchester which included a very interesting key note speaker called Linda Holbeche.

The Rally took place this week so Barbs spent time organising the length of service slides and awards to recognise those valued old timers. She’s also been busy inputting all the Quarter 1 Performance review ratings and comments into everyone’s record in CIPHR.

Laura has started making enquiries for the Health and Wellbeing week. It’s technically Health and Safety week, but we’ve decided to put our own spin on it.

And of course there’s been the normal recruitment and relations activity.

Finally, we’d like to recognise the celebration of Eid, marking the end of Ramadan this weekend.

Matt, ever full of festive cheer, brings us his post-honeymoon update for the Comms Team:

For God’s sake. It’s not even like I’ve been here the full week. I only landed back in the country on Tuesday morning and was jetlagged through Wednesday and Thursday, so I’ve got no idea what’s been going on. I’ll try and summarise my slightly foggy experiences.

We’ve changed the way we do team meetings, which means they now take half an hour longer than previously but we all know who’s where with what, which is nice.

We can no longer eat food at our desks, which is slightly distressing, though we can have snacks. Needless to say there have been a number of discussions over what specifically constitutes a ’snack’. Unfortunately bacon sandwiches don’t. Boo.

Er, there have been a number of further projects underway that we can’t talk about, so I won’t. Suffice to say they’re exciting and secret, sorry, sekrit.

Chris still makes silly noises and silly songs.  (Ed. Lots and lots and lots)

Bob still hates everything.

James has an innate love for the Family Fortunes ‘Fail’ noise.

Andy and Mand will soon be getting their own huge comms mugs, thanks to CParr breaking his. The fool.

Other than that, it’s the Derby tonight so if you see the news tomorrow and there’s just a smoking hole in the ground where Sheffield was, you know why.

It’s been fun.

Fortunately, Bob managed to find Chris a new mug.  Have a nice weekend!

James

Never mind gives me plenty of chance to waffle on about stuff ‘n’ nonsense really. I could say it’s been a busy week this week, but I won’t…

As you’ve probably seen (especially if like me you’ve been to London) we’re all over the place with posters and adverts, a couple of which are pictured below (excuse my bad photography and bad Wordpress skills) which is all very exciting.

More excitement is being had in the form of our Fibre to the Cabinet trial. Our first four customers are now live and seeing speeds around or above 20Mbps, they will shortly be joined by a further six whose orders we’ve placed this week and we’ll be contacting more customers next week. At the moment the trial is only available in two areas of the country (Muswell Hill in London and Whitchurch in Wales). A third exchange (Glasgow Halfway) will be added in the next month or so. So if you’re in one of those areas keep a listen out for a call or a lookout for an email.

Enough pre-amble, let’s hear what HR have been up to coutesy of Barbara:

Well I returned to ‘sunny’ Sheffield after a two week break, and have spent my week getting up to date with all HR goings on in my absence, which has included a lot of time updating our Ciphr HR records.

We’ve all been involved with recruitment activities, such as advertising, inductions, arranging interviews etc.

Gemma has worked on “Best Companies” admin which you’ll be hearing about again very shortly; as well analysing absence statistics.

We’ve also welcomed Laura on to our HR team, and with Jen she has been working on a handover, so that their first job share week runs smoothly.

And that’s all for today, I will share a small graph though before I sign off. This is the graph of ITVPlayer traffic for the week, as you can see there’s a nice spike on Wednesday for the football. The BBC’s iPlayer gets a lot of press but people often forget the other broadcasters have similar online TV services. I think 114Mbps is the highest we’ve seen for ITVPlayer since we started detecting it. Interesting to see that Saturday’s friendly only did about half as much. Now to see if I can schedule some training with our colleagues over in South Africa during the World Cup

Enjoy the weekend everyone and catch you again same Plusnet time, same Plusnet channel.