End of Week: 4th September 2009
Hello readers! It's been a while since I've done this (about a month I think), such are the joys of weekly postings. PJ was actually supposed to be editing today but he's otherwise engaged today so here I am! I don't have an intro ready so I'll have to go straight into things. First we have Neil from Networks
It's been as busy as usual up here in Networks with the main focus being the data centre move. I'm sure most of you are aware we are moving out a load of our kit to a far superior data centre, and there has been lots of prep work taking place to ensure all the lifting and shifting goes as smooth as possible over the coming weeks. Other bits of work include a refresh of staging servers which are used to test things before they go live, upgrading DNS, and more work taking place on the CGI service upgrade which we are working hard to deliver but want to get it right! Thats about it! Drinking beer was mentioned but not at the same time as any of the above! Have a good weekend!
It's reassuring to know to know that Beer is kept separate from the important network stuff! Moving swiftly on, here's Chris from Biz Support:
Well I suppose it was about time for this to come round to us. You may be surprised to hear that all of us in the Business support team are actually bloomin' busy! We have just had a new business broadband product set launched a few weeks ago and this has generated a fair amount of interest and inbound questions. Obviously this is a goooooood thing! The powers that be have blessed us with some more technical agents. I have to say from me and behalf of the team we are very impressed! If you don't know them, then if you do call us your new additions are Jake Sutherland and Nick Savage, so be niceThe work this week alone has been immense, we have a whole heap of Partner tickets to plough through. If your thinking 'Eh? Partner? What's this all about then!' You may want to check out some more info here. All of which I can say with pride have been dealt with efficiently as usual. The faults this week for business customers have come in fast, and MSOs don't help the situation but our man Jake seems to be quite accustomed to getting his head buried into the faults and as a new member to Biz has proven his metal! Oli has been doing partner faults most of the week and occasionally has been dragged off to help Dan Trappe with ITW work... I dare not ask him if this is personal choice - LOL (A little joke as Oli had a pretty rough time a few weeks back in Dans absence, and we all thought he would be happy to see the back of it!) All joking aside the pair of them have been getting this totally sorted. Poor ol' John Cowling has been trying his hand at managing the team and keeping all of our call stats in shape and whipping us all into shape. Needless to say he is losing yet MORE hair! John has indeed has his work cut out for him this week. The rest of us have been getting on with keeping our stats for calls and tickets in tip-top shape and obviously delivering the excellent quality support you would normally expect. Anyway, that's enough from me and you will probably hear from the Business Support Team within the next 6 weeks as you have the other CSC departments to hear from first 😄 Thanks for reading!
Good stuff. If there's one thing you can always count on, it's a Friday HR update! Here's Jen with the goods...
Well, I think we might need a jargon buster for this HR end of week…so I’ve gone for a HR dictionary of terms about what it all means: Recruitment – finding suitable people to work here Employee relations – looking after the people who already work here & hoping they do what we’d like them to New starter admin – typing up details of people who are just starting to work here and then putting them in a file Rewards – looking after the people who already work here by giving them nice things Updating CIPHR – typing up details of people who are starting, leaving and need looking after KPIs – doing a pretty graph of all the people who’ve started, left and needed looking after in the last month HR babble....? Pah! Anyway, we're going to spend the weekend optimising our opportunity to promote employee well being by having a healthy work-life balance.
HR babble? - who would ever say that! Not I and not Matt of Faults...
Matt from the faults team here! As a secondee to the team the majority of my week has been trying to learn the ins & outs of the faults processes. Myself and Sy (the new secondees) have been working CSC faults most of this week, these are the first touch on faults and would be the stage where we identify if customers equipment is causing the issue or if its a genuine fault. Pretty important to get it right from the very beginning so its been a tough week! Jon (the old secondee) has been working the jeopardy report which includes all the faults that require urgent attention, so theres been plenty of calls to and from BT to keep the faults in check! Tony has been tasked with Phone faults today which involves investigating customer issues and raising faults to BT, he's been doing a sterling job and aside from the odd bit of mouse bashing he's been relatively quiet! The rest of the guys have been chasing general faults that are already logged with BT and giving updates to customers And finally Adheel has been in charge today but we've hardly noticed him so we must all be working hard enough!
And last but not least, here's Bob with a typically nutty Comms update...
It's been tumbleweeds aplenty on the Comms desk this week, what with newlywed Matt sunning it up in Cuba with his better half and Mand no doubt recovering somewhere following all the partying in Manchester last weekend. That's left me, Andy, James, PJ and Chris manning the fort. By 'manning the fort' I mainly mean eating nuts. Yes, that's right, eating nuts! In the wake of Pete's recent inclination to sit at his desk munching mixed nuts throughout the day, James, Chris and Andy have been wading through bags of Pistachios all week. I on the other hand have not had time to partake in this nut indulgence. Mainly due to the fact that I've been working far to hard to even spare the time! (it's not really anything to do with me devouring an entire bag of Chris's Pistachios when he was away in a meeting a few weeks back... honest guv!) Anyways, here's what we've all been up to this week... I've been looking after the usual Networks change control approval, lurking in Usenet and keeping up to date with the data centre migration and CGI platform upgrade; Andy's been doing some work on the House Move and My Account pages on the website; James has been manning the forums, overseeing some dev problems and looking after some project work for Mand; Chris has been working on our London advertising campaign, and writing some email content for a mail send. Well that's about it. I'm hoping for a quiet one this weekend as the last few have been pretty hectic, having said that I'm sure it's only a matter of time before James starts trying to coerce me into heading straight to the pub! On an entirely unrelated note, here's an impressive stop-motion lego video I bumped into earlier in the week.
See what I did there? Wading sounds about right, nom nom nom... That's all for this week, I'll leave you with a quick question.. did you see the monkey?