PDAs - love them or loathe them?

Meanwhile, executives at Turner & Townsend trialled them and then unceremoniously ditched them. It seems that QSs either love or hate PDAs.

In one camp are the fans who declare they can’t live without BlackBerries and the like. They see the gizmos – many of which combine mobile phone, internet, email, Word and Excel file capabilities – as critical to being an informed and in-touch professional.

The opposing camp argues that such hand-held technology is expensive, unnecessary and even detrimental to doing a decent day’s work.

They say the addictive message-checking that BlackBerries induce means a better name for them would be “CrackBerry”.

To help you decide for yourself, Roxane McMeeken invited both sides to put forward their cases.

For

I am totally sold on them. People say: “But what about the stresses and strains they cause due to the constant interruptions, what about work-life balance?” They don’t seem to realise that you can actually switch these things off.

I was one of the guinea pigs who trialled both BlackBerries and PDAs at the beginning of the year. We have now arrived at a policy where all our (160) partners can have either one. And we may roll this out to all our staff.

I think technology can improve the work-life balance. We have opted for wireless broadband connections for all partners at home so they don’t have to rush back to the office at the end of a day out at meetings just to check their emails. In the same way, a PDA can ease some of the strain, provided you are disciplined about how you use it.

It is possible to track the use of these things, so we can tell whether people need them or not. We can track usage because the devices are all linked to a central server, which tells us how much traffic is going on.

The server was expensive – it cost £6,000. But we had to have it because the BlackBerries we use aren’t Microsoft compatible. The cost of the BlackBerries and PDAs themselves is the same as for mobile phones. We get them for a reasonable price because we’ve done a bulk deal with the service provider.

I opted for the BlackBerry because the battery life is longer than that of the “XDA2” PDA that I tried. It’s the only thing I carry now. It’s my mobile phone, it’s got all the contact details I need, I get all my emails on it. It’s great.

On short trips abroad I don’t even take my laptop anymore. It means I don’t have to frantically try to connect my laptop to the internet back in my hotel. It’s always a nightmare when you’ve done a load of work and then realise you can’t send it to where it needs to go.

Instead, I can just catch up on my emails in the back of a taxi.

I admit it’s okay for Word, but not so much Excel because the small size of the screen means you have to scroll too much.

But in any case, clients expect that immediate level of contact these days, so these devices are just a fact of life now.

Some people just want them so they can look flash. But for others, they really are an invaluable tool for recording the costs of projects and keeping benchmarking information.

In my job I hear everybody’s views on PDAs. Personally, I was one of the doubters at first, but after trialling a BlackBerry for two weeks I couldn’t live without it.

We’ve been using this type of hand-held technology for the last three or four years at Gleeds. We started with standard PDAs, but in the last 18 months staff have been asking for BlackBerries and we’ve just ordered 50 of them.

They tend to be used by partners and associates mainly. But where someone’s got a good case for using one, we’ll sign it off.

For example, we had someone working on lots of Marks & Spencer coffee shops around the country. He wanted to keep all the information on the different shops on one device that he could carry around easily.

We have also given them to staff on facilities management jobs because the helpdesk system can send them emergency alerts by text and email.

Others say their clients insist that they have one. I’m not sure if clients really are demanding it, but certainly they do seem to expect to be able to contact us at any time.

We don’t want our staff to be standing around with a mobile phone stuck to one ear and a BlackBerry on the other

It’s like a few years ago when people started saying, “I presume you do have a fax machine” and instead of sending a letter they would send a fax, and suddenly you had to respond in half an hour rather than 24 hours.

For those who spend most of their time in the office, clearly there is no advantage in their having a PDA.

They do interfere with your life. I am guilty of taking mine on holiday and checking it at least once a day.

It’s also true that they cost more than mobiles. We buy phones at £200, BlackBerries at £300 and PDAs at £400. And for the BlackBerries we have to spend extra on software licences and servers.

On the other hand, if you’ve got people who are able to work on trains, the technology should pay for itself.

PDAs won’t go away, it’s just a case of what shape, what size will make them better and suit you best.

Against

We don’t want our staff to be standing around with a mobile phone stuck to one ear and a BlackBerry on the other. You can’t work 24 hours a day – that’s the last thing we want our staff to be doing.

We trialled PDAs about two years ago. They had just started to become all the rage and a number of our staff were asking for them. At the end of a three-month trial we decided to issue them to staff only where there was a project-specific business case for doing so.

The cost of PDAs was a major factor in deciding against issuing them to all staff as standard. There weren’t enough benefits to justify the high cost, especially considering all the other excellent communications we have within the company – we use mobiles, laptops and people have facilities for working from home.

We have found that there was a business case for issuing PDAs two of three times so far. One case was a disability audit – we decided PDAs would be useful because the job involved going around lots of buildings and recording details about the facilities.

I do check my emails at home but I do it on my laptop. I also have one of the best PAs in the business, who can always track me down.

I do have a satellite navigation system in my car and I couldn’t do without it. But you don’t need a PDA to have satellite navigation. A lot of this technology is just fads, but there will always be improvements down the line, so what’s on offer may improve.

Remote access to email could be good in some ways, but at times getting away from email is a godsend. People spend too much time on email as it is. It’s far too distracting.

I certainly wouldn’t like to be able to catch up on my emails over the weekend and I wouldn’t have time anyway because I’ve got a family to look after.

I’m yet to be convinced of the benefits of BlackBerries and PDAs. We don’t use them at all (at Faithful & Gould) here in the North East.

We do all have mobile phones and laptops here, so I can check my email when I’m out of the office but I tend not to. If I’m out, I’m working on a specific project, so I’ll have all the information concerning it with me. If I started checking my emails they would probably be about other projects, but I want to keep focused on the project at hand.

I wouldn’t use a PDA or BlackBerry on the way home from work either because I tend to drive rather than use public transport. Living in the North East, you don’t use public transport as much, so maybe PDAs are more suitable for people in major urban centres.

I suppose I might use some of the special functions you get with these gadgets, such as Bluetooth or GPS (global positioning system).

We use a paper checklist for snagging, so I suppose it would be more environmentally friendly to use PDAs. It would also save us carrying around a file and pens.

Our company policy is to use less paper, so we are open to using more technology. For example, we use slim computer monitors and lots of software programs. Also all our bills of quantities are done electronically.

Still, I don’t know how much BlackBerries cost, but I know a PDA costs a couple of hundred pounds and I’m not convinced it would bring us enough benefits to be worth spending around £200 on every member of staff.

I wouldn’t mind a GPS but I can’t see my boss stumping up for it.