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.”

There was an “is it a bird, is it a plane” reaction last week to the launch of Weedle.com, a Dublin-based website which offers to connect people with other people who need their skills.

Speaking to Prosperity’s Digital Ezine, CEO of Weedle.com, Iain MacDonald explained: “You have demand for people with skills and supply of people with skills. Currently there’s no large-scale, simple way of connecting people with skills to the people that need them. We provide a very simple way to connect you with people who need your skill or to find people with the skills you need.”

The obvious question is, isn’t there already LinkedIn? “LinkedIn is a very good way of managing your contacts within a white-collar network environment. Facebook is very good for sharing your thoughts or photographs with friends. What Weedle does is enable you to connect with people who need your skill or find people with the skills you need.”

How Weedle works is business people create a profile, explain what they can do and demonstrate what they can do, by uploading a video for example. Businesses could vary from accountants to babysitters to carpenters.

For those searching for skills on Weedle, the search string is semantically analysed so that a search for a carpenter will also return results for a joiner, for example. Answers are ranked according to an algorithm, so that the person most likely to meet your search need will be ranked at the top. Also taken into account are the content of a profile, the last time the person logged into their account and how quickly they respond to queries.

You don’t have to log in for the aforementioned results. However, people who are logged in will also get results based on whether friends or contacts have used them and thought they were good or they have gone to school/worked with people. “It’s like automatic word-of-mouth,” says MacDonald, “you can see instantly who in your social network has used somebody with the skill you need now.”

It’s not just for sole traders or consultants; whole teams can sign up to it and put their Weedle link in their email signature to help clients become aware that the team does more than what the person they are dealing with does.

Weedle, which currently employs 18, is expected to grow over the coming year along with some future site improvements. “We are launching in beta, so we’re looking for some support from the Irish internet community,” says MacDonald. “It isn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination. The only way we’re going to make it better is through feedback from real live users.”

A new masters in digital games is to be launched in Dublin this week at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival gaming forum – Controller Cinema – which will feature a keynote speech from Peter Molyneux, a legendary figure in the gaming world.

Dublin Institute of Technology’s Schools of Media and Computer Science MSc in Digital Games will be launched at this event. DIT has introduced this MSc in Digital Games to meet the increasing demand from the games industry for postgraduates with the high-level skills in the analysis, creation and management of digital game content.

According to DIT, this exciting new programme will address the key occupational areas identified by the Forfás report on the International Digital Media Industry. These are: management/project management, design; artistic/creative; programming; and quality assurance.

A one-year Masters programme, the MSc in Digital Games at Dublin Institute of Technology will prepare graduates for a broad range of careers in the computer gaming industry including game designers, level designers, game software engineers, project managers, consultants, and games analysts.

The programme has been designed to encourage graduates to become innovators in this exciting field. Uniquely building on the combined expertise across the entire DIT, this industry-oriented programme will emphasise creativity and innovation through interdisciplinary study, cross-faculty cooperation, and constant industry input.

Building on the combined expertise of DIT’s Digital Media Centre, and its schools of Media and Computer Science the programme will provide modules in Ludology, game design, programming, animation, project management and the business of games.

It will appeal to graduates from diverse undergraduate and work backgrounds, including the visual and media arts, and computer science.

Also of appeal is Molyneux’s DIT Aungier Street appearance as part of the JDIFF 2010’s gaming forum, Controller Cinema. Run in conjunction with the schools of Computing and Media in DIT, the event takes place at 6.30pm, Thursday February 25th at DIT Aungier Street. Molyneux will discuss RPGs and their inherently cinematic nature as well as showcase his latest work on the evening. This will be followed by a panel discussion addressing RPG game development within the Irish gaming industry and will be chaired by Aphra Kerr author of The Businesses and Culture of Digital Games: gamework/gameplay. Peter Connolly, executive producer from Microsoft Games Studio will also be in attendance.

To guarantee a place at this event (spaces are limited) you can purchase tickets (€5) from http://jdiff.ticketsolve.com/shows/23497949/events, by calling 01 6877974 or in person at the JDIFF Ticketing Office, Filmbase, Curved St, Dublin 2. Entry will be allowed on the night but subject to space.

The event can be viewed live from Seriousgames.ie, the website of the DIT Experimental Gaming Group, a cross faculty research group for digital games in the DIT.

http://seriousgames.ie/wordpress/projects/live-stream-from-peter-molyneuxs-talk/

Facebook: www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=25053475671

Twitter: www.twitter.com/DublinFilmFest

Contract workers who fall under the category of IT contractors may need to look into seeking permanent positions results from an Irish Computer Society (ICS) survey come to pass.
A survey completed by the ICS in late 2009 found that half of respondents expected their 2010 IT budgets to be lower than the 2009 spend on IT. Respondents were mainly from the private sector in both IT and non-IT industries and the public sector.
According to the ICS survey findings, budgets are expected to fall by up to 30% in a quarter of organisations surveyed. The main area that those surveyed expected to reduce their IT spending was contractor salaries (42% of respondents) while new staff recruitment was a factor for one on four.

The future is positive for the mobile/wireless applications area. These are to be investigated by one in seven companies and piloted by 4%. 12% of those surveyed plan to implement mobile/wireless applications in their enterprise while an additional 20% will maintain existing applications. 10% plan to roll extend initiatives in this area.
As regards use of social networking, 60% of respondents said they had no plans for it in their enterprise, 11% will investigate it and 9% plan to pilot it, while just 5% will pilot it. 13% of those surveyed plan to maintain their social networking presence, while just 2% will roll back on it.

Dublin is to get a selection of digital media-related conferences over coming months to keep professionals in the sector up to date.

In two weeks’ time, on Wednesday, March 3, it’s back to college for those who want to hear about maximising business potential online. University College Dublin (UCD) is the location for the Digital Landscapes conference.
In April, the Croke Park conference centre will be the location for the Media 2020: A Vision for the Future which will discuss the key trends in the media for the next five years.

These follow the hugely successful Dublin Web Summit, which took place in early February featuring keynote addresses by Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, the world’s largest classified listings website and Matt Mullenweg, founder of Wordpress which powers over 202 million websites worldwide. The Dublin Web Summit also featured talks by Chris Horn, co-founder and former CEO of Iona Technologies, and Ben Hammersley, Wired Magazine’s Editor-at-Large.

Topics covered by the Digital Landscapes conference in UCD in March will include: Creating a digital strategy; exploiting new technologies; digitising your business model. The format will feature two panel discussions on ‘Building a Business Online’ and ‘Digital Futures’. Guest speakers include: Chris Horn, President, Engineers Ireland; John Herlihy, Vice President, Global Ad Operations, Google; Colm Long, Director of Online Operations, Facebook; Martin Murphy, Managing Director, HP Ireland; Kim Majerus, Director - Ireland, Cisco UK & Ireland; Eamonn Fallon, Co-founder, Daft.ie; Damien Mulley, Founder, Mulley Communications; Dylan Collins, CEO, Jolt Online Gaming and John Breslin, Lecturer, NUI Galway; Co-founder, boards.ie.
Media 2020: A Vision for the Future has pulled in speakers from major brands such as the BBC, RTE, the Guardian, CNN, Google, Channel 4, and Realex Payments. It aims to help attendees understand the key global trends that will shape the media in the future and learn techniques, and strategies for reaching new online audiences. The technologies, websites and applications that will capture the zeitgeist will also be discussed. Targeted at media, public relations, communications, advertising, and marketing professionals as well as journalists amongst others, it will also provide a chance to network with key influencers in the media industry.