Which balls?
"Gavin Patterson, who was recently linked with the ill-fated European Super League. His successor, Philip Jansen, picked up the ball and ran with it. "
Last time I saw, there was no picking up of balls in Football.
BT has halted all compulsory redundancies on the eve of a national ballot for strike action across the group, the telco and union CWU today confirmed. It follows 15 days of strikes waged by a small band of engineers in Openreach. The unrest was caused by BT's multi-year programme to save £1.5bn in annual operating costs, …
Simply don't sufficiently train the engineers, then when they don't fix faults you can log it as "no fault found" and charge the customer (CP, who pass on the charge to their customer).
Or, as happened in our case, don't find a fault, blame the customer kit, then do what the client asked for (rebuild the FTTP circuit), and finally claim that you've done nothing (technically she didn't do anything, the lady on the other end of the phone did it for her) and attempt to charge for it.
I know that's not a new problem, but the standard of new openreach 'engineers' has definitely fallen. It always used to be just management that were incompetent.
log it as "no fault found"
Going back more years than I care to remember (Over 30 at least) when I was a BT employee they had 2 classifications for faults that weren't able to be resolved because they 'went away'.
Right When Tested - Engineer never observed the fault so no further action.
Fault Not Found - Engineer observed the fault but it cleared during investigation. Make notes on what was observed and action taken during investigation in case it happens again.
Just posting this as it came back to me reading AC's post and I felt a bit nostalgic.
It always seemed a sensible system to me. Whether people used it correctly or cared about fixing things, that another story...
Jeezus how many more times are they going to try and branch out into IT services before firing everyone and giving up? I can think of at least 3 since the 90's.
Who on earth would want to work for BT's IT arm, your job is safe only until the next CEO walks in and fires you all.
BT is still struggling with being just a pile corroding wires and a pensions blackhole - probably another 30 years before that problem is over too.
Just what you'd expect from a regulated monopoly.
If they want to create a new business to "sell more tech and data services", Ofcom should be making sure the investment comes from shareholders and isn't extracted from the infrastructure business.