End of Day: 4th April

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Another day and another week gone by, I've no idea where the time's gone to this week, it's just flown by. Are we still not using the "b" word because it's certainly been one of those weeks where it should be used? Anyway before we waste any more time with my ramblings (probably more of that at the end) let's get going and first with an end of week we have Barbara from our HR team: - The HR team have designed and have started to deliver the Performance Review Workshops for Managers. - Gemma’s done some more work on the Employment HR legal Update. - We all spent a lot of time generating new contracts for everyone in order to outline all the improved additional benefits that were outlined during our HR Strategy presentations. Updating our HR database accordingly, was also a necessary evil! - Amanda has been putting together a new Employee handbook, with contributions from Gemma and Diane. - Amanda has been planning and developing a PlusNet Partnership Group, which will enable employees to make suggestions how we can continue to improve the business, so watch this space! Next up is Melanie from Development: Friday at last! What's going on in the department today? - The LCST team are merrily chipping away at the problem pool. - The Remote Development team are working hard to integrate enhancements to the Meeting Manager, and preparing for a new influx of colleagues from India next week to assist on the Partner project. - The ITW team (Awesome) are sporting new (mildly ridiculous) hair-dos - actually this only applies to half the team, but it paints a better picture if you imagine that its all of them. - The Madasafish II team are progressing incredibly well with integration testing. - Two of our friends from India return home this weekend, so its a fond farewell to Jose and Senthil, and many thanks for their help over the last couple of months. I sense an excuse for a trip to the pub for an emotional goodbye..... Martyn's got the Marketing update: A quick one from us today. I've been looking at improving the metadata for some of our key product pages while Chris has sent the newsletter and been planning for a LAN party in the summer. Spence has been getting stuck into recruitment and Phil's been creating 'The Marketing Map of the World', which is a great big process diagram (it doesn't look like it was a lot of fun but it will be really useful). Chris has also been making an addition to an old blog post about the 10k run. There's now a link to the JustGiving site, so if you want to sponsor our team of finely tuned athletes, it'd be most appreciated! Darren said he was writing the Product Team End of Day but I think he just ran out of time juggling all the various tasks and problems he's been working on today. Rich has getting stuck in with lots of VoIP work and documentation, I've been working on March's usage analysis and getting the finishing touches done on a couple of blogs which you should expect to see next week. Catherine's written us an End of Day for QA: QA have been a bit quiet lately as we've been concentrating as hard as we can to get everything else out before we all get swept up into testing the next phase of the Madasafish project. That's meant a push on problems, some project rolls - enhancements to our SMS system and our spam filtering - and a general tying up of loose ends. Batten down the hatches because the project goes into concentrated testing in the very near future! In other news, Gary is horror struck at the fact he'll be entering his mid twenties soon. That's not even 'late twenties'. The youth of today, eh? 😜 (Ed: Shocking) Well it's goodbye from me and it's goodbye from... well everyone else. Have a great weekend, don't forget Doctor Who is back on TV on Saturday at 6:20pm (and on iPlayer if you miss it for the week after), it's also Grand National day (go Fundamentalist!) and FA Cup Semi Final Weekend (go Barnsley!). I'm supposed to be car shopping tomorrow, if anyone has a Delorean, a 1979 Smokey and the Bandit style Trans Am or an A Team van for sale let me know asap otherwise it may have to be something more normal, but it may be better to just spend the day in front of the TV instead. Until next time....