End of Day: 22nd February

‎23-02-2008

It's Friday, YAY! Apparently Pete's been reminded of Talk Like a Pirate Day so is looking up people's Pirate names... and the rest of us are getting ready to go home. Although by the time I publish this the sensible ones will have gone. Technorati Profile Chris from the Marketing team gives us an update:

Martyn has been off ill today and Mr Kelly has packed his bags for his holiday next week! I started penning the newsletter this morning before a million and one meetings meant my afternoon was finished before it started. We've also been working on some project planning and promotional ideas for the coming months and have been responding to an inbox full of PR and marketing enquiries. Have a good weekend everybody.

Products update comes from Darren:

It's the end of my first week without Shaun and I actually have all my hair left (I think). I'm still convinced that Shaun somehow booby trapped the company dashboard to cause a new issue every day, but I now know the system inside out since today I actually manage to spend some time on it. Dave posted his latest blog and has been responding to comments after the last one was posted to Slashdot he's also continued working on our broadband product design and a few tickets.

The update from Finance comes from Alex:

Today has been a quiet day up in finance due to the fact that last night was our staff night out so we've all been feeling slightly fragile... Fiona has been performing credit checks, I have been closing customer tickets along with Andrew who has been doing cheque refunds, Mark J has also been closing customer tickets and has been working on new KPI graphs, James has been working on corporation tax, Kate has been doing payroll, Jamie has been working on the project roadmap and Mike has been working on the budget. I hope everyone has a good weekend, there will probably be a lot less alcohol based activities for the people in finance over the next two days...we learnt our lessons last night!

Development's update comes from Owain:

Today has been a day full of meetings for me in development; mainly in preperation for an open-day that a team of the senior and lead developers within the department will be running on Monday at Leeds Met University. This is a great opportunity for some of us to improve our presenting skills as well as an important chance to talk to some of the up and coming young software developers soon to be entering the market. The rest of the department has been busy with the continued work on the Mad as a fish systems as well as the day to day business as usual work.

Annette from the CSC brings us the EOD:

Today has been a very busy day in the CSC we have had a constant flow of calls today. but the weather is nicer and it is friday so lots of people will be calling before the Glorious weekend ahead. Well here are the top 5 issues for today they are as follows

With the email authentication problem yesterday it has caused many calld from customers who were unsure and changed their passwords, these calls have now gone with the wind as did the problem.

We have recieved a few calls from customers who have now recieved their hardware today but this is now being investigated.

Provisioning updates have been quite high on the agenda for today, new and old customers looking for dates when they will become active, this is a good addition for us.

Again email configuration is up there in our top 5, this could be partly to do with the issues from yesterday that were resolved.

And finally customers calling to set up their hardware, but when the xustomer is connected they are delighted.

Well that all from the friendly CSC today, have a good weekend from us all. Bye

Barbara from HR:

Amanda attended an off-site CSC meeting with Carol to create departmental objectives for the next 12 months. She has also started preparing for our ISO9001 application; has been calculating a budget for Learning and Development for employees over the next twelve months; and has been involved in manpower planning over the next 12 months.

We've also been looking at alternative solutions for our 'People Place' vision, that are already out there in the market place.

Gemma has been working with Helen in Development for our Leeds open day which is on Monday 25th; she's also been in lots of one to ones with managers and been busy with ER (Ed: We think that's Employee Recognition and not an American television drama) work.

Diane has been heavily involved in recruitment again, particularly within the marketing department.

Yesterday, we had a finance and HR 'Off-site' (actually in the boardroom – due to the rally taking place!) to share our ideas and visions of working together to support the business over the next twelve months; the conclusion being that the strategies we are currently implementing, will have an excellent ripple effect on our value add to the business over the next 12 months... and for fun we intermingled proceedings with various team building exercises where we found out an awful lot of interesting things about each other! We then carried this on as tradition dictates...over a meal and a 'few' nice drinks.

Comms update comes from Mand:

Today has been pretty quiet, with only me and Chris sat on the Comms desk for most of the day. James has been placing some orders for a couple of business users, lurking (sorry helping) in the forums, and completing his plans for the 2008 posting (the year will be over before it's published at this rate! ;)). Chris finally got around to finishing the Customer Satisfaction Survey results, though to be fair he had a valid reason yesterday! In addition he has dealt with Network problems and Change Controls, helping out in the forums and clearing down his tickets and tasks. I have been dealing with Development problems and Change Controls, some lengthy Home Phone issues, helping out and providing updates for our CSC colleagues, and completing a problem review. Matt has been enjoying a scheduled day off, which I'm sure involved lots of GH3. He'll be in over the weekend to deal with all things Comms though. Since Bob refused to send an update from Sunny South Africa we can only assume he spent the day lolling around on the beach, drinking cocktails and soaking up the extreme heat. We're not jealous you understand. Really. As we sit here in cold, rainy Sheffield. Have a good weekend. Mand

and finally... Lee from Networks updates us on the week:

This week has been another very busy one, we've been getting projects moving along nicely, but then we've essentially lost a lot of time fully recovering from the data centre power loss. The power loss was very disappointing, being a tenant in a dedicated and professional data centre environment which unfortunately suffered loss of all power sources (including UPS and Generator). On the positive side though, I'm extremely proud of the dedication and hard work put in throughout the business, but I have to say - mainly by our Networks department - to bring everything back online and repair and resynchronise systems. Well done!! Here's to a very quiet weekend, and a quieter week!

Well, I'm not going to follow Jonny's style of ending with a thought for the day... so night. Colin