End of Day: 26th February
Today's been Tuesday, and it's hard to believe it's nearly the end of February already, which (hopefully) means before too long we'll be able to leave the office at 6PM to daylight. It also means it's my turn in the 'Editor' position - perhaps I'm being punished for asking for submissions for an 'End of File' yesterday rather than an EOD. Thankfully, today I did manage to ask for submissions for an EOD so on with the latest round of updates...
We begin our tour of the office today with Rowan in the Development department
In Dev. we've been looking at growing the department in a whole bunch of different ways. Owain mentioned the Leeds Open Day, there's Matt's post on working with oher teams around the globe, but we also indulge in a bit of good ol' traditional recruitment as well. I've been getting involved in that by looking at the example code from applicants, checking the little test we give them in the interview, and having a chat with them afterwards. The stuff I've seen so far is pretty promising and hopefully talking to me afterwards hasn't scared anyone off. On the off-chance that you're reading this and thinking of applying - if there's stuff on the test you don't know just put "I have no idea, but I'd google it and find out"... I reckon that's always worth half a mark.(Ed: Wish I thought of that when I did it after a 4hr train journey for my interview...)
Next up, we have Chris in the CSC with the Top 5
Hola! Top 5 for Team A this morning.
- E-mail Setups
Customers calling for help setting up e-mail client. Mixed bag of new starters and older customers. Some customers who have entered the default mailbox username and pass rather than the username+mailbox hence calling wondering where their e-mails are gone.
- Fault updates
Mainly logged faults in particular No Sync. Logged analyst informed and the fault then worked on and customer called back pronto with an update.
- Router Setup
Customers calling for help setting up router for the first time, or after re-installing Windows, asking for login details for USB modems.
- Firewalls
Fair few customers calling in unable to browse. As above firewalls causing the problem seems to be isolated to Norton blocking IE. Disabled for proof all tested OK.
- Sales and Upgrades
New and existing customers calling for advice on what package they should be changing to or signing up for. Advice provided or accounts scheduled for change to chosen product.</li
Thanks for reading.
Matt from Comms gives us their update
Another fun one today (is fun an acceptable replacement for busy?) Bob is still in South Africa but has certainly been a bu... er, blue bottomed fly and no mistake. He's raised a P1 problem, 3 further lower priority issues, gone through the Brightview problem pool evaluating each one, has been doing dial tests via proxy (and muggins here was said proxy...), acting in a 3rd line support role and also helping out with the IWF over there. All this and he's eaten pizza and been considering where to go for a curry later on. You scare me, Bob. I'm not sure after that that it's worth telling you what everyone else has been doing, but if I didn't this end of day would be rather pointless. So, here we go. Mand has been catching up from her day down in London yesterday and picking up on her to-do list of tasks, updating various projects, chasing problems and also picking up development change controls. Chris has again been moving up and down between the CSC and networks like an indecisive elevator, has been chasing network related problems and picking up network change controls and has also been about in the forums. James has continued his work on the End of Year blog (when will we stop writing these mammoth blogs? Well, I guess when you're all fed up of reading them I guess), has been managing accounts (a much bigger job than it sounds, even if it already sounds big) and has been the main forum gent of the day. Meanwhile I with my late start (it's Friday for me! Yay!) have been chasing further high usage customers, have also popped into the forums occasionally and have been investigating and making plans for the best practice on managing high users. It's all in a days work.
Finance bring us their update via Alex
Just a quick update from finance Today James has been preparing for month end, Mark J has been doing partner billing and working on problems, Kate has been working on payroll and I have been allocating customer payments and closing customer tickets alongside Andrew. Hope this gets in in time! (Ed: Yep, it did :))
and finally today's QA update comes from Catherine
Communication has been the name of the game today as this morning Gavin and I failed to tell each other what we were doing, meaning that we were both confused as I kept starting one of our testing pods and he kept stopping it - confusion all round! It's a big day for Gary, too, as he has *finally* been able to close the initial bug tracker for Madasafish. Another step forward in our work with them. I have been mostly disgusted by the awful neologism 'webinar'. It's horrible to say, horrible to hear and ruins the whole point of the word 'seminar' as a beginning point for new ideas. In between linguistic fervour I've been managing the rollouts again and doing some problems. Nigel has been working away on his Home Phone testplan and the Matts have been testing signup changes (Matt 1) and testing some big problems after enjoying his lie-in this morning (Matt 2). Please cross your fingers for Paul who has a rollout tonight - last time he was hit by the power outage so he got up in the middle of the night for nothing. See you tomorrow!
We've also been busy publishing blog articles over the last day or so, including a look at SEO, the proliferation of "emoticons" and an interesting look at PlusNet's Development processes over the life of the company.
That's all for tonight, Colin