Firstly can I apologies for the lateness of the EOD posting today, this is due to the fact that I finished editing it at work but ran out of time to post it as my better half was about to "leave me" due to being 20 minutes late to meet her for the 2nd time already this week! So here I am now at about 9pm finally getting round to posting it!
So I obviously didn't do that bad a job editing the End of Day last week that the "Fools" have asked me to do it again. All the spelling mistakes and grammatical errors must of slipped through the net (or maybe I can spell after all!) 😄 .
So starting us off today we have...
...Ben From Development
It's been a really busy day here in development, so just a brief update on how my day has been. Myself, Rick and Matt are working on some signup enhancements to make our signup process more resilient as well as improving the reporting of how users progress through the process. This has been a hard project, and we're all looking forward to this getting live, but we know that this can't be rushed as this could cause the opposite effect of what we're trying to achieve.
One of our web portal developers (Tamlyn) presented a workshop today on usability to a few of us in the development department. It was aimed at giving people a better understanding of what usability is and how we need to be thinking about websites (and pretty much anything else) from the point of view of the people who will be using them. The content came largely from Steve Krug's 'Don't Make Me Think' and Donald Norman's 'The Design of Everyday Things', and it was excellent. I am really looking forward to Tamlyn running another workshop to expand on the principles he mentioned here.
And finally, our Indian development colleagues have a great treat tonight. They all going to watch the big match, probably the most important match of the night, Sheffield Wednesday Vs West Bromwich Albion. I hope they have a good night - and aren't put off football forever, and that's from a Wednesday fan
Alex from Finance adds...
Today has been very busy upstairs!
James has been working on month end along with Mark Bell and Kate, Mark has also been dealing with month end and partner billing. Fiona has been training staff today as well as keeping up to date with various tasks. I have been sorting out invoices and working on customer tickets along with Andrew.
Catherine has this update from QA
There was a bizarre moment today when I suddenly realised that, in addition to a rather funky design on the front, Nigel has a large section from an Anglo-Saxon manuscript printed on his left side. If only he'd stop moving about I could have a go at translating it 😄 Well,it'd be a break from checking the contents of two databases which is what I have mostly been doing today. I have also been working with networks on some testing tasks.
Gary and Nigel have been doing this as well but against different databases to me. They seem to be a bit snow blind to it now as they've just realised they've been checking off the same list for the past hour.....d'oh! Gavin has been doing more spells with Gandalf the QA Wizard and the Matt's have been respectively doing more testing of enhancements to the signup process and wrestling with our testing environment. Stephen is still not well and Paul is on holiday. See you tomorrow 🙂
Chris champions today update from Comms
Well it's been a typical Tuesday in Comms land, Bob is back from lazing around in SA (he claims he was working hard).
So what have we all been up to today, here we go:-
Bob has been fielding Network change controls, working on some MAAF problems and reviewing the new functionality currently being added to the Manage My Mail tool.
James has been doing his bit on outbound sales calls today along with placing lots of orders. He's also been seen in the forums.
Mand has been on a mission to see how many problems she can push through and close today as well as fielding the Development change controls. I have also been busy with problems, along with posting in the forums, writing service status postings and some ticket work.
Darren in the Products Team has the following update
A day full of reporting for me, lots of requests have come through for new reports on various things from activation success, to reporting on our new Enhanced Care option for businesses. Ian’s been working on our future hardware stock and preparing for his trip to Cebit tomorrow.
Dave’s been pumping out those usage stats again; he’s been working on February’s Usage analysis and on product design. Rich gave me a list of tasks he’s been up to, though unfortunately I couldn’t pronounce them all, though I did make out that he was working on VoIP documentation.
Craig updates us with the CSC top 5
- Fault updates Generic updates, most of them phoning up within 24 hours saying they had been told they would have an update within 4-8 hours rather than the 48-72 hours that they should be waiting.
- Hardware setup As always customers receiving new hardware and being unsure on how to set it up.
The 1800s have got better now they have some instructions with them but all modems are being called about from anywhere between not added the realm to still got it in the box.- Provision chasing As always customers phoning up to confirm that their order has been received, checking activation dates and confirming it is not in delay.
- Sign ups Although new sign ups are always good to have with the varying length of the calls and they mainly come in at busy times and are top priority for all call takers it does take away staff from tech for 10-30 minutes sometimes more which can make a medium call queue become a large queue.
Only a top 4 today as we have had a lot of different calls but nothing that stands out enough to be the final entry.
Colin the old faithful gives us this update from the Web Development Team
In the Web Development Team today, we've been working on some alternative skins for the Community Site and some changes to the Broadband Your Way Pro pages.
James has been creating a web frontend for the Flickr Photos on the right hand side, while Rupert has been working on our web tracking system as part of some improvements to the Signup process. Apparently he's been eating Twirl's this afternoon, and working on some email sending stuff (apparently...).
Tam's been running a Usability workshop and has been prototyping the Broadband Your Way Control Panel. Dan's been updating some of our internal tools and Jonathan and Sam have been working on Problems and Manage My Mail stuff.
So there's another edition of the End Of Day completed, and from what I can see (from my spell checker) the delivery was near perfect 
Good night everybody!