End of Day: 17th of September
Phew. Late one from me today as well. Today I've been in lots of meetings and working on a presentation about some improvements we are working on to our Workplace application. What about everyone else? Chris from the Comms Team
Quick EOD today from us, somehow I've been conned into writing it even though the rota shows it's not my turn. We've all been hopping, jumping, bouncing, running and clambering around trying to keep on top of our work today. James has been vanishing for unspecified periods into various meetings and has also kept on top of problems. Matt's been doing some more home phone work and looking into the problem process. Bob's been handling change controls and posting relevant service status posts from this along with numerous other tasks. I've been keeping an eye on problems, answering some IT related questions and cleaning up some task work too. So from all of us today, including the minty badger, have a good evening and we'll see you tomorrow. addendum - Oops! Nearly for got the Random Link!
Catherine from QA
Hello everyone! QA has been down two today, with Gavin taking a day off and Matt 1 unfortunately falling prey to the bug sweeping the department. Those of us soldiering on, though, have been beavering away to try and hit our weekly targets. Matt 2 and Paul have been on problems, working with our Polish colleagues in Wroclaw to get as many fixes live as possible. I've been working with Rupert on a round of related problems, tidying up the loose ends from various projects and live rolls. Nigel has returned rejuvenated from his holiday and has been working with Team Awesome on yet another Secret Project. Finally, Stephen has been in a much better mood today (phew!) and we've all drunk plenty of hot drinks of our choice - unlike Comms, we each make our own so we don't have the tea round 🙂 But what is that minty badger Chris is talking about?
Minty Badger? Is it this? Rys from Dev
Dev EODs can be hard to write, since often we're not allowed to talk about specific products or projects, because they refer to future development on our roadmap, and we don't want to preannounce things to customers before the business is ready. It's no surprise however that we're working on a set of products provisioned on top of 21CN (24Mb), BT's next generation broadband network in the UK. It's some of the most exciting work we're doing at the moment in the department, with Paul Mitchell taking on most of the work stream at the moment. He's doing work to make sure our systems are ready to trial 21CN provides and get users connected over it, so products can build the best offering for you guys. Today I've been working on static IP assignment to users, where we need to communicate to RIPE and let them know why we're assigning a customer significant blocks of addresses. There's opportunity to automate the data generation using information in Workplace, with limited user interaction, so I've done just that. It'll save our business support guys a fair amount of time, letting them be more efficient and respond to the customer's request for address blocks in a more timely fashion. Our core goals for software development here revolve around automation and efficiency improvements, so it's nice to work on features where that's clearly visible. Elsewhere in the department we have mail system consolidations happening with our Brightview vISPs, to merge platforms and save costs and overhead, and we had a successful test today of software that better manages our Ellacoya platform, which customers will see soon. Until tomorrow.....
Amy from Marketing with an ultra brief update.
Gav - creating some landing pages and looking at our campaign data. Chris - writing and sending customer emails Spence - in London on a jolly (Ed: He's talking with BT about sign up processes!) Sameer - analysing the exit points on our website. Shailini - spreadsheets, meetings, conference calls Me - running round like a headless chicken really, busy bee
Ooh hang on, Catherine is back
STOP PRESS: Gary has been very helpful today, doing his usual ad-hoc staging support role as well as lots of testing on his current project. I also forgot to mention him - sorry Gaz!
and so you should be! 
John from Business Support next
I've been asked to write the end of day today at last minute so apologise if it seems a little rushed. Martin - Has been working faults today mainly. Mark - Has been reviewing some training documentation. Adam - Has being focusing on dropping connection faults. Chris - I don't know what he's been doing. Working hard I don't doubt. Phil - From the sounds of it has been having fun speaking to our friends at BT wholesale. Sam - Has been doing some administration of our partner accounts. Dan - Has been holding down the Teleworker front. I've been placing Partner orders, and chasing up on some fault issues I have knocking about. (A customer wished me 'Good Health' which was nice) Cheers, thanks a lot - John
Al from the Networks Team
DBA calling Earth! Today in Networks, the DBAs (Database Administrators) been reviewing tons of SQL in preparation for a database upgrade and doing the usual chasing down problems. The Ticket Team have been sorting your queries and problems, the Dev team have been documenting the shiny new systems they are developing, while the Ops Team have been decommissioning old kit, improving our internal monitoring systems. Managers have been in meetings. Isn't it about time you, our customers, told us what you've been up to all day? Have a good evening all
-- All done for the day. Talk to you guys tomorrow now doubt over on the forums!