End of Week: 23th October 2009

‎24-10-2009

Why Hello! I've been a little slack in my End Of Week editing duties recently, mostly due to my being away on holiday to Istanbul, but I'm back now and Andy B has quickly jumped on me to get back on the wagon. Well, what a week to pick up for editing! Our Development department has been furiously busy getting our new product set ready for it's roll out in the really unsociable hours of Thursday morning and since then we've been working to make it it's all working correctly. That's meant a couple of late nights for the team, but that's to be expected on a project as large as this one. If you aren't sure what I'm talking about, go and read our announcement for Up to 20Mb. We've been juggling this with a couple of issues with our Faults platform as well, so apologies if you've seen any issues when trying to raising us one. What updates do we have from the other teams? First up is Barbara from the HR Team.

Healthy food, walking to work (bus strike), signing up to be blood donors, relaxation techniques learnt, sugar levels and blood pressure checked, ways to stop smoking discussed, reflexology and massage tasters sampled, goody bags received phew! Therese and Gemma have also had chance to up sticks and have now joined the CSC floor, by taking up residence in room 7; Jen, Laura, and me have decided to stay with Dev (we’ve got used to them passing though; they also make us nice cups of coffee from time to time). We’ve also organised TSA and CSA interviews (Ed: Technical and Customer Support Advisors!), prepared MDLP (Ed: Management Development and Leadership Program) module 2 information and facilities; communicated final levelling scores to management, made amendments to the Company Handbook which will be posted in the near future, and held D&G workshops for managers. Happy birthday to Laura on Monday too!

Cheers Barbs! Next up, Jonathan from the Web Gang

Goodness, that was the week that was! It's been a busy one with the product launch. We've also been fixing problems, some nips and tucks and a few smoothed out lumps and bumps. Never one to avoid work, Nick went on holiday, the slacker. I've been suffering from PMF (Peruvian Man Flu), but battling through. Sam enjoyed his massage, courtesy of our Health and Safety Week offerings. Gary has been drinking tea like there's no tomorrow and Jonny has been letting others make him tea, a shining example of a natural delegator. Last but not least, Phil said "no" when asked if he wanted me to write anything on his behalf. We're off to recharge the batteries. Have a good weekend, everyone.

Alex from Technical Support

Lots of new things to learn and new questions to answer this week with the changes to our residential products. Not only have we released our new PlusNet Premium package but our entire signup journey now allows customers to take advantage of BT's new 21cn network (up to 20mbps speed where available). Although these changes may seem small from a customer point of view the changes on our side have been huge! Aside from all things new we have had our usual busy evenings on calls, busier than normal in fact. This may be due to some issues with our automatic systems which will deal with raising new broadband faults. Some customers (and us of course) have had problems raising faults which has inevitably caused a rise in the number of calls that come in to our contact centre. Also in the CSC this week we have also put up a large motor racing track poster on the wall in the shape of the PlusNet logo. Next to this is a list of all the major Formula 1 constructors.... more to come about this later. I'll sign off at this point, back to work for me. Enjoy the weekend all.

Finally, Andy from the Consumer Team. Who you say? We used to call them the Marketing Team!

It’s been a busy week for the Consumer team. This week our new broadband product has been rolled out for new and existing customers - Plusnet Premium. Our Pro package has been tweaked too, and now offers 20GB peak time usage, which is up from 15GB (pricing remains the same). Our home phone products have changed too, so our current range of products now offer free 0845 and 0870 calls in their inclusive talk time. On top of this, we’ve talked about our future plans for colouring in, posting things that we’ve coloured in, sent the newsletter (well, sort of, depending on who you speak to), and updated our Pro customers on their usage change. Chris has had an astonishing week too, well, when he hasn’t been driven to distraction by the ongoing Cheryl v. Whitney debate. He’s actually used another program other than Excel for a change, and made some pretty slides in PowerPoint. I’m jealous, as I only got to make one slide this week. We love PowerPoint up here

Ooh, stop press, PJ has appeared with a last minute post from his crew.

Not much to report this week. It’s pretty quiet really so I’ve given the guys the day off. Ha! They wish. Only joking of course. It’s been well, what’s the word? Busy. Yes, that blooming ‘b’ word again. But honestly what can I say? It’s been a busy week. It’s nice to be finally live with the up to 20Mbps products finally. And pleasing that all the hard work that has gone into preparing the support content and FAQs seems to have led to a smooth product launch from our perspective. There’s an awful lot of prep work that goes into a product launch and this has been one of the biggest in quite some time. We’ve had Mike training the call centres on the new products over the past 3 weeks. Putting together the training material was pretty demanding on both him and Mand, who was instrumental in collating the facts and key points about the new products. Mike, Mand, Matt, Brad & Chris in the UK and Justin in SA all helped to deliver the training in time for launch.

So, as I look over the floor and see the last few developers starting to finish up on their bug squashing and report writing for the week, I think it's time I left. Off to the bouldering wall for me I think. Or to the pub perhaps, we certainly all deserve a beer! Oh, btw, you can follow us on Twitter if you are into that sort of thing: http://twitter.com/plusnet