End of Day: 7th January

[#1]

Amidst the doom and gloom of the economic situation, the technology industry is nevertheless setting out its stall at events such as the Macworld show and CES 2009.  We're looking forward too, to the broadband services we offer getting faster (with ADSL2+) - and we'll keep offering great value products at competitive prices. A quick roundup of the updates from around the building then..   Let's start with Catherine from QA: A fun start to the day for me, as a lens fell out of my glasses and fixing them made me late for work. Whoo. After I eventually got in, it was straight into testing all sorts of account changes, then a meeting about some networks juggling we're doing so we can move out of one of our data centres. So, let's go round the table and find out what's happening on planet QA: Gavin has been off today (well, he was working over Xmas). Matt 2 has been working on problems all day, including more hopper problems as mentioned yesterday. Gary has been remarkably quiet - so quiet in fact; that I don't know what he's been doing. Something all consuming and technical no doubt. Nigel has been working away on the same project as me, from the phone point of view, since he's our WLR guru. Stephen has been managing, and sneaking out for cigarettes. And he'd been doing so well with giving up too... Paul has been working with Henry on an account changes project (not the same one as me 🙂 ) all day. Finally, Matt 1 has been helping me and Nigel and doing some bits of development in between. I've changed my mind a bit about Spotify; where it's good (eg, more mainstream stuff), it is pretty good, although the search function could do with some refining. It did provide me with the strange musical moment of the day: Nick Cave doing a version of Pulp's Disco 2000. It's....odd. Well worth a listen if you've taken Kelly up on his offer of an invitation. Search for 'Nick Cave' or, indeed, 'Disco 2000'.   Mand, tell us what's been happening in Comms-land: Today has been a strange day. We're almost back to full strength as a team, but we're still missing the one they call CParr (get well soon Chris). Bob has been working on 'Port, Network Change Controls and a couple of problems. He's also been smiling, laughing, and whistling. Now Bob can only usually be described as angry so this is concerning to say the least. We are unsure what crazy things Bob being cheerful will bring about, but if anything unusual happens this evening you know what to blame it on. James is feeling on-calltastic, though I suspect this is only because he gets a lie-in as a result. He's spent the day in the forums, working on a couple of special offers, and whining about the air-con. Matt has been working on some Home Phone clean up work, some task work, and some training for our Support Teams. I have been working on some special offers, clearing up my task list (it's one of my New Years resolutions to keep on top of this :/), annoying developers, and working on some problems. Anyway that's it from us for today, catch ya tomorrow.   And Michael in Business Support is last today to give us the lowdown: So, what has been going off in the business team? Well its my first time to have input into the end of day for the business support team, that is probably due to the fact that I've only been on the team for 48 hours so I'm a newbie in the BSC so apologies if I don't cover everything the department does. So what is it like on the business support side ? Well it's quite a transition from supporting residential customers to business users, the demands are obviously much higher due to the Internet being a critical part of every day business use - and there is a much wider variety of queries coming into the business support team So what are we doing and what have we been doing? Working on the business team has service level agreements so we have to make sure that we update all the oldest tickets/ contacts first to ensure SLA's are met. There is quite a mixture of queries ranging from domain adding manual records to broadband connectivity faults. Adam's been working on a few protracted faults and escalations; Mark has been contacting customers whose payment details have expired or had a re-issue of a card. Martin's been working logged faults today which are faults that have been raised to the network supplier.  He's been obtaining fault updates whilst liaising with the supplier for remote changes and booking appointments for end users. Gordon has been filling himself with caffeine-related drinks and placing new and existing orders, he has also been doing some general account maintenance to ensure customers' accounts are in the right state for activation. Phil has been roaming around the ticket pools and keeping as much work as possible to ensure we are within SLA, he has also been filling in time with a few occasional faults and escalations. I've been getting to grips with how the business support team work and generally answering customer queries, working faults and technical tickets. Generally it's been a busy day all round and its time for some RnR (at home of course).   R'n'R.. sounds like a good idea.. Toodle pip EOD fans.   Peter