End of Day: 29th February

[#1]

'Allo 'Allo or Good Moaning as they say in certain sitcoms. It's the end of the week and it's also leap day or ladies day as some people call it. Anyone out there born on this day happy birthday, they don't come round very often, although not as rare as 30th February. So what do we have in store for you today? Well let's start with Barbara in our HR department: Amanda has attended HR meetings with BT in London for a couple of days this week. She has been preparing the bonus scheme and performance levels in general, as well preparing the HR budget for 2008/9. Gemma attended Leeds Open Day, and this was really successful; she has also been discussing performance levels during 1-2-1 with team leaders. Diane has looked at our headcount planning process; and has also worked on how our marketing structure is going to look. In addition she has conducted people manager training, and has also been discussing performance levels during 1-2-1 with team leaders. Next up is Phil with the CSC update: Well today has been a good one, for a Friday we have done quite well to keep on top of the issues and incoming calls. Not only that but the network has been fab today and not caused any issues. The only thing that tried to challenge us was the weather (pouring with rain). What does this have to do with our update I hear you ask, well I reserve the right to randomly talk about the English weather when it is dull, ha ha. Back to business:-

1. Faults Updates - Surprisingly we still have a large number of people calling in to request an update in the outstanding faults.
2. Router Configuration - Yup, it is ye old favourite of the router config again. This continues to be the mixture of the brands of which we supply and the ones we don't supply, if only their help assistants were as good as ours (wink,wink)
3. Sales queries - We continue to have a very healthy number of sales enquiries from new customers. I am glad to say the customer base is growing nicely, keep 'em coming.
4. House Moves - They say we are about to go into financial ruin but the request for house moves is looking like it is on the up, I am not sure if the governments financial advisors know about this?!?
5. E-mail set up - We are still receiving quite a few requests for e-mail client set ups, this is for a mixture of clients. Get the word out that we have some great support videos in the Help and Support section of the www.plus.net website and on YouTube, this will help you and us in a big way.

Paul represents our Development team today: It's leap-day Friday, another week has passed and Plusnet Towers is still standing despite being shaken around a bit by an earthquake. It's all go here in Dev with work progressing on the second phase of Madasafish integration, Enhanced Care rolling out, several remote development projects approaching completion and mopping up after last week's power outage. A few lucky devs have escaped the office and are attending the 3rd annual PHP Conference in London which we're sponsoring. Look out for their report on the blog next week once we've hunted them down and recaptured them. Not to be left out, I'm going to be at BarCamp Manchester which I'll report on next week. That's all. Have a good weekend! Over to Planty to let us in on the goings on in Networks: Yet another hectic week here in the world of Networks, quite a few mop up tasks on the back of last weeks power outage, this unfortunately has taken the majority Network Operations time but it has hopefully led to a more stable end to the week. The team who concentrates on tickets and single user issues have had another great week, a very quick turn around on tickets hitting that team which is not always easy as these hit us at random times of the day but they have been on top of these which pleases me greatly. The Development side of Networks have been making great strides with their road-map items such as SPAM protection, clean feeds and very importantly for me and my guy's the data centre reviews. Good weekend to you all, don't forget mothers day! Matt's going to tell us now what Comms have been doing: EOD, EOD, EOD... I dunno. There's so much I'm not allowed to discuss in these posts. Can't discuss tea, can't say we've been busy, can't openly take the p.. mickey out of anyone. I don't know. What am I meant to write about? I suppose I could tell you what we've been up to... Well Chris has been divided between Networks and the CSC, as ever. He's done networks change controls, has been policing the autoturn servers (basically chasing users that haven't collected their mail in a while - Bob? Are you listening to this? I know you were on the list...) and has also been forumming. James has spent most of the day in the forums today, though has also placed a very respectable number of orders for our service. Mand has unfortunately gone home ill this afternoon but I know she was busy with problems, projects and meetings this morning. Myself, I've been going through the problem pool, adding referrals to accounts that need referrals adding, have been around in the forums and have also been clearing out my task list which had grown somewhat over the past couple of days in my absence. Weird how that happens. (Ed. Wasn't me this time Matt...) Bob? Bob's let the side down today. "What have you been up to, Bob?" I asked. "I'm writing the end of day." "Eating grapes" came the reply. Self-pleasurer. Alex from Finance is next: Everyone has been excitable in Finance today...payday AND friday!!! (Ed. Finance excited about spending money?!? Something wrong 'ere.) James and Kate have been doing the month end prep, Kate has also been dealing with payroll queries. Mark Jacks has been working on invoices and expenses. I (Alex) have been allocating payments and closing customer tickets along with Andrew. I hope everyone has a good weekend and the weather improves! Rich is going to give us a quick sum up from the Product Team to close things off. Apparently he's bought a golden house and diamond studded Jaguar... just one problem he can't afford them. Ah well, I've lent Ian a pound and he's going to buy a lottery ticket and split it with us if he wins, which gives me a good segue to link to Dan's excellent Tech predictions for 2008 post. In other Products Team news we now have Fon box and it's connected to Sharedband which (in our case) is three ADSL lines all linked together to give one really fast line (I think we were getting just over 12Mbps down and 1.2Mbps up on a speedtest without doing any tweaking). This is something we'll hopefully be looking to trial, if anyone fancies taking part then please leave a comment. Or if you have Fon and are passing by the building feel free to try and give it a go. That's it for now, nearly time to go home for the weekend. Happy Saint David's Day for tomorrow and don't forget Mother's Day on Sunday. I'm going back to generating random numbers and wondering whether I can be bothered to go shopping on the way home. Take care everyone... and have a good weekend.