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How are your project management skills? More and more job descriptions are looking for people with project management skills and a new offering is on the market to help.

A new Irish project tracking online tool built with Web 2.0 technology is to create up to six jobs by the end of next year. Barney Austen, who founded MyProjectTracker with Eoin Redmond, says the tool aims to make project management more accessible for businesses.

This year the focus will be on sales and product management staff, while plans to recruit development staff will start next year. The target is to employ four to six people by the end of 2011, says Austen.

MyProjectTracker, explains Austen, is directed at consultancies and small businesses right up to large design houses. “It’s designed for people who run lots of little projects and need to keep tabs on them or big companies that have one or two projects with a lot of people working on them, so you have both sides.”

It tracks time, costs and milestones across projects to allocate resources efficiently, meet deadlines and maximise profit margins. It also gives instant visibility of all projects, showing those that are on track and those in danger of missing deadlines or running over budget.

The online tool is open for friendly user testing for the next four to six weeks at MyProjectTracker.com before its commercial release in April. When officially launched, it will be priced by the number of users a company assigns to it per month – without an upfront cost.

It’s suited to projects running for more than a day in duration and costs don’t need to be tracked either. It can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be, says Austen, but an advantage is that the whole team can use it without any need for training. “The whole intention behind this is to keep it as non-techie as possible. A lot of the language that’s used in project management is elitist and can seem very distant and removed from business users. What we’re trying to do is take the good practices of project management and bring it into a tool that business users can understand.”