Guess what? It's Friday again and looks like me in the editor's chair again. Well it's my chair as the editor doesn't get a special chair to sit in, although I think they should and I vote for a La-Z-Boy. Who's with me on this? OK no-one probably. So let's see what's been going on around the building during the course of the day. And we'll start off with Barbara from HR who as a bonus will tell us about the week that's just gone: This week Amanda has been focusing on the new Management Development & Leadership programme, she also completed the teams' performance reviews, prepared for our monthly HR team meeting, was involved in recruitment and selection on a couple of roles. Amanda also took Diane and Gem to observe an employment tribunal as part their ongoing development. Gemma spent a day working on the employee handbook; she has also refreshed the company induction following feedback from new starters, and spent more time on Ciphr changes for CSC shifts. Jennifer returned on Tuesday, and has spent some time preparing the Tower event, making offsite bookings, amending organisation charts and recruiting for our PlusNet Partnership Group. Diane has spent most of the week with Marketing recruitment – but the end is nigh as this has been going on for a few weeks now. Diane also managed to look at exit analysis, and fit some study time in. Today we’re going to be in our monthly HR meeting all day, hence the early posting! Lukasz next representing Development: Hi, i'm Lukasz from LCST, its my turn to write the Developer team EOD.
- The Quality & Assurance Team is fighting with our BIG ISP Migration Project which is right now on Gamma staging platform, going shortly to our Live servers.
- Stephen and the rest of guys from LCST are, as usual, doing a great job keeping all the portals up and running.
- Arek (officially a PHP developer) said that he was drinking coffee all day, so maybe that is his main occupation at PlusNet
- As I said, the Migration Project is going further, we will do more bugfixing during the evening and across the weekend.
- Ula wrote a nice summary of changes in our Development team. You can read this here.
- After almost five weeks of eating British lunches (Ed: have you tried toast with sugar or baked beans and mashed potatoes), I finally started to enjoy them. Everyday they become more tasty for me and probably for the rest of our team
Over now to Marketing and we have Martyn: If I had to sum up today in one word, I'd choose 'meetings'. Yep, we've had a lot of meetings today, although we've got some other stuff done too. Chris has been working on PR for some gaming promotions and working on some emails, and we've all been reviewing the team objectives for the year. There's also been a bit of work on recruitment, and I've been lending the Web Team a hand by bug-fixing on one of their projects. See you on Monday. Next is Bob and the Comms Team update: Been a relatively quiet on the Comms desk today with Matt & Mand off and James across with the Sales team. That's left me and Chris manning the fort. Chris has been working on the Aladdin trial, prepping the comms for the development rollout we've planned for the weekend, and looking after Dev change controls. I've been drafting the copy for a few emails, keeping a close eye on things following the spam config changes we made yesterday and looking after Network change controls. I also made the tea today so I think it's only fair Chris gets the beers in after work 
Have a good weekend all. Time to hear from Networks and today we have Jason: Hello from the networks team. I’m Jason the Information Security Manager here at PN towers. So another busy week for all the peeps up here on floor 3! Net Dev and Net Ops have had a stack full of work to help support the Brightview phase 2 project that rolls this weekend. Net dev have also been putting in the hours for the design and implementation of the PNDesktop project along with important work on the sledb platform (part of the magic that provides our industry leading traffic management). Over in net ops Aaron and Kev (AKA Parbin boys) have been continuing to learn how to do all the IE – Tickets and since they are bright lads are coming along nicely with that one. Neil Minor (a recent addition to the networks management team) has been getting to grips with the IT support tasks along with Jamie and Steve. Jamie in IT support has also been cracking on with the cryptocard project which will enhance our internal security (keeps me happy). Big Jim in facilities has had fun with the aircon this week… basically with all the hard work going of in PN towers the units have been working overtime and Jim has had to run around trying to keep all the staff from over heating. (aaarrggghhhh now I have an image of JC in a loin cloth with a big palm leaf fan). Penultimate entry today is from Stephen in CSC with the top 5 issues:
- Router setup - This is generally new customers that have received their hardware but are either having difficulty with the instructions or are missing the realm off their username
- Email Client setup - Setting up email clients mainly Outlook Express; some customers using the incorrect username configuration for secondary mailboxes or not sure how to setup mail access using a client.
- Fault Updates - Customers calling back in after doing checks on CSC faults or wanting updated information on logged faults.
- Authentication Faults - Some new faults being raised, seems to be mainly authentication issues today, occasionally a few intermittent or no sync faults too, no major issue is apparant, authentication faults may be related to a recent BT outage in the London area.
- Username/password issues - A fair few customers calling who have lost or do not know their username and/or password.
And finally for today Rich has a Products update: Today has been one of those days - the kind where you get lots done but none of it was on your to-do list! We did find time to eat Jaffa cakes and Custard creams and impose a long standing Best Practise on Luke. Luke must now bake a cake for the rest of the team to become a full member of the product team. Its stupid but I don't make the rules! A taxing 'Battenburg or Swiss roll challenge' has been set. (Ed: Jamaican Ginger Cake!) I've been busy working out what we need to do to completely decommission our Broadband Phone platform following the migration of accounts on May 1st - the first step is to turn off our SIP servers and we've done that this evening (theres no customer impact unless you've cunningly been connecting to our legacy Broadband Phone platform using the direct IP of the servers!). I've also been helping out with some technical tickets and working on a service review template for the Gradwell relationship so we continue to get the best out of the relationship now and in the future. Luke has been beavering away at our migration figures, monitoring our hardware stocks and troubleshooting CSC Analyst queries, liaising with BT warehouse to ensure order fulfillment and updating our internal KPIs. He's also been reeling in pain after losing out to me at pool this lunch time. And that's all folks for another week. Most people seem to have gone home now, I've still got another half hour or so to go, enough time to do some work on a couple of blogs I'm writing, and will be checking on the network over the weekend. Of which I'm planning a lazy weekend of doing not a lot at all, spending no money, avoiding cabbage soup and watching Lost and Doctor Who. Until next time...