Anyway, before I start to rant and rave let’s get on with the show. First today with the HR End of Week is Jen:

What a difference a week makes! Last Friday, we were on the top floor and now we’ve moved in with Development.

Over the last week we’ve mainly carted all our stuff down three flights of stairs (okay, I ‘fess up, we used the lift).

So, why the move?

We’ve now got a proper reception area to welcome visitors. I’m manning the fort, with Barbara as back up, and the rest of the team are tucked around the corner.

It’s been all hands on deck sorting the move and loads of people have pitched in. You know who you are - thank you!

Meanwhile, we’ve all been busy keeping on top of our usual jobs, including…

Welcoming new starter Gary Rockett, and saying goodbye to leaver, Martyn Levitt,
Supporting changes in Development and Failed Billing,
Working on producing and reviewing KPIs,
Planning for the Plusnet Partnership Group meeting,

…and many more things too numerous to mention.

Meanwhile, Amanda’s been deciding what’s next on the agenda and updated our Strategic Roadmap which we all took a peak at in our team meeting. Watch this space!

Next up, from Development, is Matt:

Hi there, Matt from the Java team,

I’ve been working on some performance increases to our continuous integration platform. Builds are taking way too long at present and this will hinder us when we try and deliver our brand new shiny development environment. I’ve also been making sure anything I’ve worked on recently is nicely documented for the rest of the team.

Owain has been busy with his meetathon of a week. He and the other seniors are devising a master plan for some major new projects.

Ali has been recovering from a successful rollout this week, making sure documentation is up to date and making sure our source control is in order.

Have a good weekend everyone.
(I hope it doesn’t rain like this for its entirety!)

Over to Brad in our Faults team:

Afternoon all, shame it’s not a nice one weather-wise! It’s Brad here from the Faults Team reporting to you.

Today it is has been up to myself, Andy, Alex, Pete and Tom to go through the oldest fault tickets which have been logged with BT and action these. These can be anything from confirming the fault is fixed with the customer to passing it back to BT for further investigation.

After we have completed the oldest ticket report (which we call Jeopardy or Jep for short), we have been jumping into the ticket pools to ensure these are actioned and customers not waiting too long for an update.

Ben (who has joined us for a 1 month secondment from his tech team) has been going through newly raised faults and either making sure customers have gone through all the checks or raising these to BT so they can be fixed. Obviously diagnostic analysis is very important here so we make sure this is of a high standard and Ben has not disappointed so far!

Finally, Adam has been testing and raising Home Phone Faults then going through escalated faults which are normally of a more complex nature. To top this off he even went over to a customer’s house this afternoon to run diagnostics and to ensure all checks have been done. Top work!

It has been a hard week but hey, ’tis is what we are here for after all, to help you customers out who lose their service. The weather isn’t looking good so we are expecting more faults to be raised due to Mother Nature. Have a great weekend all.

Paul’s going to tell us what QA have been up to:

Hi there, Paul from QA here,

Today has been a complete washout…!
Thankfully not in the terms of QA productivity, just the weather. Luckily I’ve had my back to the window all day so I’ve been spared the misery of watching the pouring rain.

Today Gary has been ‘doing lots of things’ in his words, I know this included spec’ing improvements for our staging platform. Gavin has also been very busy with various tasks including helping on a project handed over to him by Nigel.
Matt R has been again testing possible webmail improvements and Matt B has been working from home on a new product. I have been working through problems, mainly rolling problem fixes to the live platform to give you guys better support and a better customer experience.

Hope you all have a good weekend!

Penultimate update for today comes from Bob in Comms:

It’s been nice and tranquil on the Comms desk today. James has had half a day off and Matt’s still on leave which has left me and Chris to man the fort.

I’ve been keeping on top of the recent uk2.net issues, reviewing networks change controls, familiarising myself with some of the up and coming things we’ve got in store for the mail platform and attending to the odd problem and forum post.

Chris has been in meetings, investigating problems and perusing the forums.

It’s Martyn of Marketing ilk’s last day today so we’re all off to the pub to see him off in true Plusnet style. Chris says he’s not coming but I’m sure it’s not going to be difficult to twist his arm. He could even bring along his new and improved Plusnet mug to swill his ale from! You can’t really tell from the photo but these mugs are huge! Don’t worry though, we’ve secured them to the table with our laptop locks so they should be safe from the cleaners over the weekend

For today’s random link, I’m going to go with a bit of 80’s TV Nostalgia - They definitely don’t make ‘em like they used to?

And finally we have Martyn from Marketing:

Well well. Today’s Marketing end of day is a farewell from me. After 5 years it’s my last day in the office. In that time I’ve worked on loads of product launches, written probably thousands of emails and made the occasional blog post here on the Community Site. This one will be my last (sob).

So, what have I done on my last day? Well, it’s been a day of tying up loose ends and handing over work and knowledge. I’ve also broken my umbrella so I’m expecting to get really wet on my way to the pub in a few minutes.

Spencer’s been designing posters for some internal promotions and he’s been in meetings. Again. Chris has been getting access to some of our internal reporting systems so that he can create pretty graphs. Gavin’s prototyping web pages again and Sameer’s once again digging into the world of web analytics.

Oh, almost forgot, we launched our banner ad campaign yesterday! Have a look at The AA and DigitalSpy and you might see one. You’ll probably have to refresh the page a few times though.

So that’s it from me. Thanks to all the staff here for my leaving presents (although I’m not saying thanks for the Leeds United shirt - spit! ). Bye!

Good luck Martyn and take care. I’m sure we’ll see you contributing to the Community Site from the “other side” so to speak.

And on that bombshell we’re out of here until Monday. Catch everyone again then…

Comms have a submission from James:

Welcome to yet another wondrous day in Comms (and hi especially to Andy Bunker’s Gran!).

I’ve mainly been working in our forums, along with attending some meetings and taking some calls to help out our Customer Services team. I’ve also been looking at development change controls as Matt’s on the skive. On a boat.

Chris has become Friday Parr a day early (again) and has been heard making a number of strange noises. Aside from that he’s been working on the West Kensington to Fulham exchange migration, looking at some faults, dealing with problems, and the customer satisfaction survey.

Bob’s been angry. Probably angrier than I’ve seen him for a while, but that’s probably because it took him half an hour to find his keys this morning. Along with his anger, he’s been dealing with services statuses, change controls, a spot of usenet and forum posting and looking at some problems. He’s also finally made a cup of tea after being prompted to thanks to the power of the Community! Thanks guys!

See you tomorrow
James

Colin from the Web Team ensures we get their entry:

Hmm, unusual for me to be on this side of the EOD fence…

Today, there seems to be lots of joined up thinking and diagrams going on. Jonny’s been doing flow diagrams for the Upgrade Process, and then G-Man has been translating them for the PUP (Plusnet Upgrade Process). Kelly’s also been looking at diagrams, trying out some mind-mapping tools. Pete? Well, I know he’s here as I just passed him on the stairs - I think he’s been in the CSC all day.

Duffy has been working on some support updates, while Wojtek has been working on a mini-rebrand for one of our other websites. Dan’s been working on some internal forum improvements. Phil has been looking at removing an item of hardware from the Broadband Signup process. Mark, Nick and Andy have been working on problems, Support updates and various emails. Sam’s been building new 404 pages and rebranding the Plusnet Starter Guide, while Gary is still looking at his print stylesheets, and getting to grips with our CVS system.

Me? I spent this morning waiting at home for a new bank card to arrive (since I lost it the other day there) and getting on with reviewing some code and looking at some forthcoming items. When I finally arrived in the office, I’ve been working on getting some things ready for testing.

As a side note, I spent 2.5hrs in the CSC last night answering tickets and seeing how the company works ‘at the coal face’ which was an interesting experience.

Colin

Chris comes to the rescue for Marketing:

It’s nearly the end of the week - so it’s nearly Martyn’s leaving do. Shailini has been presenting our recent figures to the big bossmen, Martyn has been busy handing work over to the rest of the team and Spence has been in meeting hell.
I’ve been working on some updates to our referrals pages and Amy had to go home early as she was feeling poorly.

Fingers crossed she’ll be back tomorrow.

We have a CSC / Business Support update from Phil:

Hi folks, Phil from Business Support for my first installment of the End of Day.

I try to keep up with these postings, so you may have to excuse me on any banned words.

Today has been one of those days that just doesn’t want to stop, the phones have been hot, though I do think that’s to make me suffer seeing as I have tomorrow off.

* I have been playing about with some documentation and customer faults
* Mark has been dealing with a Major Service Outage we detected
* John has been dealing with some of our partners and some bulk orders
* Adam has mainly been dealing with customer faults

And Gary makes a last minute contribution from QA:

- Today I’ve been testing our partner platform (Again)
- Catherine has been working with networks on change controls and also working on problems with our remote development team in Poland.
- Paul has been beavering away testing problem fixes
- Gavin has been doing some secret work on automation trying to run stats on how successful certain things have been
- Matt 1 has been testing some possible improvements for our webmail platform
- Matt 2 has been in a rather long meeting
- Last but not least Nigel went home early today after being in quite early rolling out project secret squirrel

And finally in attempt to compete with comms I thought I would throw this one in

The idea is that a normal CPU processes things one at a time, and a GPU has parallel processors that can do (in this case) 1100 times the work in a single stroke.

Well, thanks for reading, and see you again next time!

Roo

For those of you that don’t know, my gaming systems of choice are XBOX 360 and PC. Both have advantages and disadvantages and have been covered in a lot of detail elsewhere around the web so I’m not going to bother with that. What I am going to do is go over a couple of upcoming things I’m personally looking forward to in the gaming world.

Firstly, the new XBOX 360 dashboard. I first heard about this just over a month ago, and from what I’ve seen of the new interface, it promises to be pretty good. There will always be those opposed to change of course.  Those that don’t want to use the new dashboard will still have the option to continue using the current ‘blade’ interface.

There’s also going to be the option to install games to the hard-drive to speed up loading times ‘in-game’.  The disk will still need to be present in the disk drive to prove ownership. This sounds promising for the larger games that may involve some loading time between levels but will obviously not make any difference for those with the 360 Arcade - this doesn’t ship with a HDD.

Personalised avatars similar to those on the Wii are another introduction for the update which is due out soon. This will mean you can represent your personality better in the gaming world. 

Personally I’m looking forward to the update - I like new shiny things

Now on to what could be the best game for a long time or a completely overhyped flop. Please, please, please let it live up to the promise and be the game it deserves.

As you’ve probably guessed from the blog title, the game I’m referring to is called Alan Wake. A quick poll of the 3 people currently on the Comms desk shows that the other 2 hadn’t heard of this game until I mentioned it, so maybe you haven’t either.

For those that haven’t heard of it here’s the blurb on it:

Alan Wake is a psychological action thriller, a unique new take in the world of gaming. The game is set in an idyllic all-American small town and its surroundings in the state of Washington. Alan Wake, the game’s protagonist, is a bestselling horror writer, who writes a novel about his darkest nightmares. In the game, those nightmares come true.

It’s being made by the same people responsible for Max Payne and was announced back in 2005. Since then numerous rumours about Alan Wake have surfaced, varying from it being due out next week to the developers abandoning the game. The developers have continued to be cagey on this saying that “Alan Wake is pretty ambitious, in terms of what it’s trying to do. It’s taking a very different approach to storytelling and gameplay and it’s taking a lot of work to get it right.”

Let’s hope they do get it right and make this game amazing.

Thanks for reading and I’ll be back with updates and other news soon.

Chris

OK - ‘end of day’ time…

Marketing are up first - thanks to Amy:

Martyn is counting down his last few days here (sob) meaning handing over his enormous amount of work and finishing off his last few efforts on the business stuff.

Sameer has provided more stats on how our website is performing and taking over control of SEM from Martyn.

Chris has been running round all day doing various PR and referrals type-stuff, whilst Phil has been looking at our churn stats as well as working with the sales team.

Gavin and Spence have been working on the signup journey as well as some hardware items.

Shailini has had her head in spreadsheets all day number-crunching with finance and I have been looking at how to increase sales with our affiliates and partners, sorting out a few problems and generally sneezing all day due to a cold

That’s all from Marketing, I’m off to get some more Beechams! (Ed - I’ve got cocoa if you want. And slippers!)

Next we have Comms with Chris. He is not drinking cocoa nor does he have a cold. He is however here with an update for you. I think the long title below makes up for the short update

Comms Styleeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Bob’s been Bob, nobody else can be Bob, fortunately. He’s been handling change controls, looking at email issues and working on some problems.
Matt’s been knee deep in home phone work and has the next week or so off.
James has been blogging and in the forums.
I’ve been faulty today, well helping out on faults as well as trying to deal with some problems.

Fun little game: Click here!

Finally, here is Catherine from QA:

Hello!

Gavin and Stephen are back with us today so this morning we actually had a full team for once! Gavin has been making some tweaks to our problem tool to help us work more efficiently. Matt 2 has been testing the beginnings of yet another secret project - it’s all mysterious round here, I can tell you. On that note, Nigel’s secret plan to use the sun to toast a giant marshmallow, sorry, I mean make our platform better is rolling out tonight. Good luck everyone!

Matt 1 was doing some admin and creating a test plan. Gary has been working on the Partner platform again and Paul has been working on the product tool. As for me, I’ve been on problems, managing rollouts and helping Dan in development test a tricky faults issue. Finally, it’s GeekUp again! Yay! And I know Comms usually post a link, but I came across this yesterday - it’s a rollerskating ninja car chase!!

Thanks everybody and especially for that link Catherine - it’s cool!!

Laters!

Ali McGowan

I’ve got a nice little cross section of opinion.  We’ll start with Wojtek, one of our web designers.  Then we’ve got Bob, who probably one of your more advanced web users and ending up with me, someone who’ll just use a web browser to view a few webpages and not really bothered about having tonnes of plugins, RSS feeds and so on.

Wojtek’s feedback is pretty straightforward.  He says “the interface kicks ass, usability-wise. It’s easy to use, plain and clear”.  So that’s one happy customer!  He likes the way how each tab has its own process, it works faster and that makes Wojtek happy.

Bob’s feedback is a touch more extensive (as you’d probably expect if you knew Bob!).  Luckily, he’s summarised it for us

 Likes:

UI for pop-up blocking - I like the way you simply drag the window into view from the status bar, although not being able to see how many pop-up windows have been blocked is a pain.

Look, feel and speed of web-browsing - It looks sexy and seems really nippy.

Download interface - I like the way it stacks downloads in the status bar and lets you interact with them from there, although I don’t like the way that it seems to save every file you download even if you choose to automatically open it.

Create application shortcuts from any webpage a la Prism - I don’t really need to use this, but it’s quite funky nonetheless.

Incognito - similar to private browsing on IE8.

Each tab runs in a separate process so one tab can’t crash the browser - This is a godsend! Try pressing shift-escape, it gives you a bespoke task manager for each tab/plugin, very clever!

Drag a tab out to the desktop background and it removes it from the original window and into a new one.

Dislikes:

Tab behaviours - e.g tabs open next to the existing one which I don’t like. I can’t automatically focus on newly created tabs, I can’t open new tabs from searches, I can’t open my homepage on new tabs. I can’t middle-click the back button to open the last page I was viewing in a new tab  (and focus on it). It’s for these reasons that I worship Firefox’s TabMixPlus plugin.

Lack of settings/bookmark synchronisation feature like in Opera 9.5 or with the Firefox extension Foxymarks (I’m surprised they didn’t incorporate a Google Browser Sync hybrid).

Lack of integration for social networking/bookmarking, e.g stumbleupon/digg - I have a lot of Firefox plugins that allow me to interact with these sites using my browser’s toolbar or right-click context menu.

Does it do RSS feeds - They certainly don’t render to cleverly when I try viewing them.

Doesn’t behave well over remote desktop  i.e can’t minimise the window.

As for me, like Wojtek, I’m really liking Chrome.  I’ve been using it for most of today and whilst I haven’t found that all webpages load faster, I reckon the Community Site loads fractionally quicker and some website are definitely much faster.  I really like the pop-up blocking feature, where all pop-ups are hidden at the bottom of your screen, unless you drag it into your main window.  I also really like how if a webpage that you’re running on a tab crashes, I don’t need to close the whole browser, just close that pesky tab!

What do you think about Chrome?  Have you had a play with it yet?  What do you like and dislike about it? Let us know!

James 

Many people see this as likely to reignite the browser wars.  With Google’s unmatched online presence it’s very likely, even considering the fact that Internet Explorer has such a huge installed base (even Firefox has just 20% of the browser market), that this will prove to be a very successful and smart move for them.

We’re all very keen to try it out here at Plusnet Towers - particularly in the web team.  We’ll let you know how we get on with it.

Peter

Bob tells us more about this later, and why it’s not always possible to rely on backup systems to automatically take over.

Let’s first see what’s been happening with the CSC.

Hi Chris here again from the Customer Services Team.

It has been a good productive day again today in customer services, except my beloved Sheffield Wednesday has still not been taken over, but my fingers have been kept crossed just in case, but that’s another story.  The two new starters we have in our team have settled in really well, which is a good sign.

Top 5 issues for today.

1. House Moves - We are getting increased amount of customers wanting to move their broadband to a new address.
2. Order Updates - Customers wanting updates on their new accounts or house moves.
3. General Billing - Customers who are wanting help to understand their bill a bit better.
4. Package Changes - Customers wanting to change their package which suits their usage requirements.
5. Hardware Ordering - Customers who have been with us for over 12 months, who want to order free hardware and stay with us for a further 12 months to take up on this offer.

A hop up a floor, and across the landing to Web Team.

Duffy here in the Web team. We’re all just about settled in our new desks now - though I’m missing the fish.  ‘Lots going on today.

Colin has been code reviewing, developing code and talking in code.
Wojtek has been mopping up various Design-based problems.
Dan and Tam have been working on improvements to our Workplace system.
Gary has hit the ground running and is currently involved in some CSS work for printing.
Sam and Grzegorz have been building the interface for the new My Account.
Jonny’s been looking at upgrades and there’s talk of a Plusnet screensaver.
Mark, Andy, Nick and I have been working on various support type updates, mainly involving templates.

Ok Bob, tell us how things look from Comms’ perspective:

Well, it’s been a pretty darn hectic day today, what with last night’s website problems, the maintenance work this morning and the unfortunate loss of power to one of our data centres.

Despite some complications early on, we’re quite please with how quickly we managed to restore access to all customer-facing services (within 2 hours). In an ideal world everything would automatically failover to our back up systems; as nice as this would be though some services do need the TLC of a human being to make sure they’re nurtured back to good health with no loss of customer data. So pat on the back to our networks department for pulling out all the stops.

In addition to posting Service Status updates on the above, I’ve been reviewing networks change controls and investigating the odd problem.

Matt’s been busy with the clean-up work for a particularly nasty Home Phone problem (not long left to go now Matt!), Chris has been in the forums and has done the last of the work required to close the Aladdin trial.

James has been in and out of the forums all day and done a spot of project work.

It’s an easy one for the link of the day today methinks. I heard Chris rabbitting on about it this morning and there’s been no end of people twittering the news about Chrome.

Google let slip yesterday that they’re due to announce a beta launch of their new fandangle web browser later today (it might even be available by the time you read this).

There’s some screen grabs here.

I was particularly impressed with the comic-book style of introduction they’ve given their new baby.  I think it’s an incredibly effective way to communicate. Of course I was impressed on the one hand and a bit miffed on the other - because I’d talked with our designers about this idea some time ago. We’d love to do something similar one day with the ‘welcome to Plusnet’ PDF that you get when you signup.  What do you think?  Do you like the Chrome ‘comic’?

Pete

We’ve had a new starter in the Web Team today. I expect you’ll be hearing more from Gary in the coming weeks. I’ve been helping various people with various JavaScripting issues today and also trying to make a drag & drop web page layout save itself automatically. Colin’s been mostly doing code reviews. Mark has been fixing problems and continuing to update the new customer welcome booklet.

Stephen from CSC:

Its been pretty busy in the CSC today but that can be expected. Mondays are generally busy after the weekend. There don’t seem to be any major issues, just the usual calls regarding faults and setups. Todays top 5 issues are as follows:

Email setup - A large number of customers have been calling for help with setting up their e-mail clients, lots of customers buying new computers recently it seems, and possibly some new customers calling for assistance too.

Fault updates - Customers calling for updates on outstanding faults. No major issue evident however, just usual fault updates. We have been chasing BT and providing updates where we can.

Sales - Plenty of sales calls today, always good. A lot of queries about our products: people wanting to know further details.

Router Setup - We generally get a high volume of calls from customers looking for help setting up new routers or configuring their current ones. This could indicate a high volume of new signups which is always good.

Usage queries - Customers have been calling regarding hitting usage limits and being capped, we have been advising customers of our pay and go option on our Broadband Your Way product family and discussing upgrade options.

Catherine from QA:

Today we’ve been down three so pretty quiet. Matt 1 has been on live problem rollouts and Matt 2 has been being stunt-Stephen while our noble leader is taking some well earned rest. Gary has been testing the Partner platform some more and being overjoyed at access to some top 80s pop music. Nigel has been working, once more, on his secret plan to beat the zombie hordes make our platform even better for you, our lovely customers. Finally, I’ve been on problems, particularly some RADIUS testing with Geoff from Networks. It’s very interesting but quite a lot to get your head around if you’re not used to it. I’ve also found time to eat three bags of lobster and chilli flavour crisps. No, I wasn’t convinced either when I first saw them, but as you can tell, I am now. Have a good evening, folks!

Matt from Comms:

It’s Monday. We hate you all.

Nah not really. We love Mondays here in Comms. Today Chris has been loving problems, blogging and the forums.

Bob has enjoyed Service status posts, change controls and catching up on our email platform and its associated issues.

James has been made happy by project work, task work, problems and forums and also me asking him to summarise his exploits from the day rather than listing them item by item.

I’ve made the only cup of tea today, mainly because it had got to 3pm and Chris and Bob were still bickering about it. Seriously, six hours of pointless whining. Even toddlers get bored of it before that. Ah well. It was nice tea (I always make nice tea. It’s a small thing, but it’s important.)

I’ve also been soldiering on with my immense spreadsheet.

Well, a good link for a Monday - how about Link? It cheered me up.

Take care all. Cheers.

Chris from Marketing:

A busy start to the week in Marketing with plenty of number crunching going on. Me and Shailini have been preparing some stats for a review meeting tomorrow, Amy has been working hard on month end reporting with our affiliate partners and Gavin has been working on some changes to our signup journey. Martyn has been busy handing jobs over as he sadly departs at the end of the week and Sameer has been reviewing the performance of the website in readiness for the meeting tomorrow.

We are now several months down the line and it’s time to bring the trial phase to an end. We’ve asked those involved in the trial to give us feedback on how the trial went and how it could be improved as a service.

Performing this trial has helped us identify that this type of service is one which would offer great value to our customers, although there is still plenty of work for us to do on aspects of the product before we are in a position to fully launch it.

We’ll let you know as soon as we have further information about how and when we plan to launch our Parental Control product.

Thanks

Chris Parr

The reason for the delay is that we’ve been saying farewell to Darren today, he’ll shortly be headed back to his studies and in true Plusnet tradition been given a the send off he deserves. So Darren, here’s to you mate, take care and thanks for all the efforts you’ve put it. I’m sure you’ll keep in touch.

In the meantime let’s see what the rest of the business has been up to today and first Martyn with the Marketing EoD:

What’s been happening in marketing today then? Well, Chris tells me he’s been looking at some data to do with My Referrals. He’s also been looking for some new software that we can use to send emails out to customers. If you’ve got any recommendations please let us know!

Amy has been trying to get as much information out of Darren as possible, because it’s his last day today. Sameer’s been looking at the impact of the new wesbite design on Broadband Your Way Option 1 sales. I’ve been working on some updates to our business product pages, Spence has been to loads of meetings and Gavin’s been prototyping some new web pages.

See you next week.

Next up Steve from our Faults team:

Hi it’s Steve from Faults. Today I have been working on home phone faults this morning arranging engineers and calling the customers with updates. In the afternoon I have been dealing with escalated faults. These are mainly faults that have been on going for long periods so I have been chasing them up with BT and informing the customers of the latest updates.

Keith, Alex, and Andrew has been dealing with faults raised by customers recently and performing diagnostics to determine if the fault needs to be escalated to BT. This also involves interacting with the customer to ensure all necessary tests have been complete.

Richard has been dealing with the oldest tickets that have been raised to BT on a jeopardy report and following completion moved onto no synchronisation faults that have been logged with BT. Peter has also been working with the no synchronisation faults. This afternoon Peter has been reviewing the faults surveys completed by customers after a fault is resolved in order to create a new and improved survey for future faults. The results of the survey have been gathered and should be blogged to the Community Site soon!

Brad has been doing a mixture of roles today including jeopardy and a range of faults currently logged with BT. Brad has also been helping out the management in assisting staff around the call centre and driving performance.

Over next to Jen with the HR End of Week:

We’ve done a load of different stuff this week between us in HR. Here is a snap shot of some key bits:

Gemma has been on a report writing course and updated the Company induction. She also carried out the Absence Workshop mop up with Amanda.

Amanda has also been preparing for the Know Your Market module of MDLP and researching Investors in People accreditation.

I’ve been full steam ahead with the Christmas party booking and we now have director approval. I’ve also been researching childcare voucher schemes for us to offer.

I can’t believe it’s only been a 4 day week!!

Jimbo next from the Comms Team:

Hi everyone!

It’s been another fun filled day in the Comms Team today, with, as ever, entertainment supplied by the one and only Friday Parr, although I think he’s been a bit on the subdued side, but not THAT subdued!

I’ve been calling a bunch of Metronet customers today along with doing some other tickets, raising problems and replying to a few forum threads.

Matt’s been continuing his WLR processing work and Bob’s been working on Problems and change control.

Friday Parr has been hicupping, looking at problems, looking at the Alladdin platform and generally being “special”.

See you next week!
James

Lastly for today the CSC top 5 from Adheel:

Hey peeps, here’s the Friday end of day from the CSC floor, hope everyone has a good weekend!
1) Router set-up/Config
Always in these Top 5s, most of the calls that came into the CSC today were from customers needing advice on setting up their ADSL modem or router. A good mix of existing and brand new customers calling in and needing a little help on getting up and running.
2) Fault chasing
Again like the above, some teething problems where customers are trying to set-up their mail clients for the very first time and getting some details incorrect, also where customers who have been with us a while and just wanting to run over things after encountering problems in outlook/Thunderbird/Mac Mail.
3) Provisioning Updates
Customers calling in to confirm the progress of their broadband activation or broadband/phone service move to a new address. Mostly where customers have no current internet access to check this on-line.
4) Billing queries - Customers calling in regarding billing and account queries. Customers looking to upgrade their packages to suit their needs, which is always good. Now a much better range of products suited to particular users, e.g Option 1 for someone who only uses the ‘Net an hour or 2 a day, or PRO for someone who likes having a long weekend playing games and downloading music from iTunes! (hint at my own weekend
5) New Faults - Unfortunately we do have some customers who encounter problems with their broadband service. Some calls come into the CSC and tech staff are able to locate and resolve a connection issue directly, or sometimes where further testing needs to be done by our excellent faults team and a fault being raised accordingly.

Well that’s it for another day and another week. A lesson to be learnt is don’t leave your laptop at work when you need to post the end of day and the only PC in the house doesn’t have a mouse. Ah the joys of PCs…