TRACTO GmbH & Co. KG – Streamlining Project Management with Blue Ant

How the Trenchless Technology Pioneer from Germany Manages 60 Projects a Year with Blue Ant

Every year, TRACTO manages about 60 projects. Michael Stinn, Head of Digital Business, oversees the company’s full digital transformation. In this interview with Blue Ant Managing Director Norman Frischmuth, he shares his experiences with the implementation and use of Blue Ant.

Welcome, and thank you for taking the time to speak with us! Before we talk about project management and Blue Ant, could you briefly introduce yourself and TRACTO?

Thank you for having me! My name is Michael Stinn. I’m Head of Digital Business at TRACTO, responsible for both internal and market-facing digitalization. That includes traditional IT as well as customer systems, web portals, and similar services.

TRACTO started as a mechanical engineering company, though that description doesn’t fully capture what we do today. We develop, manufacture, and sell innovative solutions for trenchless installation — pipes into which, for example, fiber optic cables, power lines, or other utilities can be pulled. Trenchless means we don’t have to tear up streets, sidewalks, or newly paved driveways.

We develop the machines for these solutions, provide consulting services (for example on geology and soil conditions), offer a wide range of services such as maintenance, repair, and servicing of machines, and round it off with digital solutions related to this technology.

So a fairly extensive product and service portfolio. How large is the company, and how many people work for TRACTO?

Worldwide, we have around 700 colleagues. The heart of the company is in NRW, in the beautiful Sauerland, where most of our team is based.

With 700 people, this product range, and digitalization, project work must be a constant. Can you describe your project landscape?

Absolutely! Project work has become increasingly important, often outweighing day-to-day business. In IT and R&D, project-based work has always been standard. Now, other departments and management also need to engage in project transformation programs.

Project work is everywhere, but the expertise varies. People like me, from IT services, have been working this way for a long time. Some colleagues from other departments struggle initially.

To address this, we’ve launched a new era of project management via Digital Business. We introduced new collaboration standards and started training programs. Traditional IT projects no longer exist in isolation; now, we have business-IT projects with departments fully involved. Colleagues previously unfamiliar with project work received training in methodology, requirements analysis, process analysis, and more.

Currently, we handle around 60 projects per year, though there are more requests. Project durations range from three to 24 months. Business-IT projects are complex due to the number of participants, with 20–30 people per project team — a real challenge for project managers. Good tools are a huge help.

Why did you start looking for project management software? What were the main pain points?

Exactly what I just described: many people in projects with different skill levels, approaches, and preferences. This led to a mix of tools — Word, PowerPoint, MS Project, Excel, even Teams. Keeping track of everything became difficult. Project managers spent a lot of time collecting status updates and maintaining plans manually. Those overseeing multiple projects essentially worked blind.

At our scale, this was no longer sustainable, especially as project work increased. We needed a way to maintain plans easily, monitor progress reliably, and ensure transparency and accountability — which is only possible with an integrated tool like Blue Ant.

What convinced you that Blue Ant was the right solution for TRACTO?

Simply put, Blue Ant met all our requirements. What stood out was scalability. I could either introduce a small tool we’d likely need to replace in a few years or a big solution that would overwhelm everyone. Blue Ant perfectly filled the gap. Its functionality is huge, yet we aren’t forced to use everything immediately. It grows with our maturity, giving us incredible flexibility.

How was the implementation? Any lessons learned or tips for others?

The process had two phases. Since we chose a cloud version, the initial rollout was simple. Training was flexible and effective, especially since a lot of training was offered online.

We first had to define standards clearly so they could be reflected in the software. New users received project methodology training, and the initial functionality was adapted to the broader user base. This allowed everyone to start motivated. Everything worked smoothly and quickly.

The second phase involved integrating Blue Ant into our existing system and data landscape. Our goal was to avoid manual data transfer from other systems. Key areas included time tracking (employee attendance) and ERP integration. External invoices are automatically assigned to projects, eliminating the need for manual lists by project managers.

One challenge was organizing our existing system and data landscape for seamless integration. Extensive testing paid off. Today, external costs flow automatically into the system, making it significantly easier to manage projects with external participants.

One aspect we initially underestimated was how quickly the number of users would grow. We first managed it with concurrent licenses, but we clearly didn’t have enough. When we asked employees to start logging their time, no one could access the system. So I recommend getting one or two extra licenses. In the end, more people usually work on projects than originally planned. Overall, everything ran very smoothly and added a lot of structure.

Currently, 62 users are registered: 15 project managers and 47 project participants. This number continues to grow, so our previous three licenses are no longer sufficient.

Of course, the beauty of the cloud version is flexible scaling. Even though we offer annual contracts, additional individual licenses can be rented or canceled as needed. This is particularly relevant at the start when many users access the system simultaneously. Over time, usage usually evens out, typically at a ratio of one license per eight to ten users. You mentioned many users are already active—can you describe the main features they use?

For us, everything revolves around project planning, especially classical methods. Most of our agile projects are actually run as hybrids, but we use Blue Ant’s standard configurations for those as well. A central focus is resource planning. Previously, departments couldn’t accurately predict when and to what extent specific people would be needed. Now, with Blue Ant, we plan all projects upfront and can communicate clearly: “We need persons X, Y, and Z starting in August for this many hours.” These tools are highly effective for collaboration with departments.

In my area, portfolio and program management are particularly important. We divide our strategy by programs, and all digital initiatives are executed as projects within these programs. Another practical tool is our portfolio, which I can assemble as needed to provide a clear overview of projects.

These tools are also heavily used for program and cross-functional management. Most project participants mainly interact with time tracking and progress reporting.

A major advantage is increased accountability. Each employee knows exactly which activities are expected and can quickly report: “I’ve logged X hours on this project and am about 60% done.” The system is very user-friendly and requires minimal training—usually 30–60 minutes depending on tech affinity. Only project managers need more intensive training.

We often see that line management plays a central role. Line managers assemble teams and allocate resources. By the way, the upcoming LTS Blue Ant 24 release will include several goodies, like individual dashboard widgets to better monitor teams and workloads.
But back to TRACTO: introducing a tool like this, increasing transparency and accountability—how has it changed collaboration?

Transparency has dramatically changed how we work. We can now reliably see when we need whom. Previously, some groups thought they were overwhelmed with projects, now we see the actual demand is often smaller. Conversely, some assumed a single person could handle all projects but the available hours simply weren’t enough. This led to some eye-opening moments, and discussions are much more fact-based. We now talk about numbers, data, and facts, not feelings or opinions, which has significantly advanced our work.

Dashboards with traffic-light indicators and trend charts provide a much better overview: where do we stand, and where do we need to act? It is often specific tasks rather than the number of small projects that create challenges.

This transparency allows everyone to see exactly what is expected in the project plan, making communication much more effective. Previously, employees juggling multiple projects struggled to track their tasks across Excel, Teams, or OneNote. Now, they know exactly what’s expected and can integrate it into their weekly planning.

This improves not only collaboration with departments but also transparency within our Digital Business area. We plan classic projects, organizational projects, and day-to-day tasks, ensuring baseline workload—e.g., 30% of an Application Manager’s time—is always accounted for and not exceeded.

This is crucial, because the risk of overloading employees with 160 hours of project work per month while neglecting daily responsibilities is high. Transparency helps enormously.

Regarding time tracking: do you capture full working hours or only project-specific hours?

This is purely project time tracking. Full-day working hours are recorded in the HR system, and we don’t reconcile them. Our goal is to allocate effort to projects. The Digital Business area is closer to full-time tracking because we also handle organizational projects—but that’s not the main focus.

Let’s return to the topic of interfaces. Many of our customers are concerned about how data exchange in the cloud actually works and how to ensure everything runs smoothly. Their concerns about secure and efficient data transfer are, of course, understandable. Could you tell us a bit about how you handle this process in your cloud services?

We've experienced no issues at all. Our architecture uses middleware to transport data between systems. We’ve always connected cloud systems with on-premise systems and other clouds. Often, a pragmatic, file-based exchange is the fastest, simplest, and most reliable approach. Sometimes old-school methods are the most robust and cost-effective.

In this specific case it's also more cost-efficient to use this one tool.
Blue Ant offers connectors for upload/download and supports REST services. The key is to keep things as simple as possible for daily data transfers.

To wrap things up, I’d like to ask one final question: Do you already have plans for the near future? You mentioned that you don’t want to implement everything at once, but prefer a step-by-step approach. Are there specific areas you plan to handle differently or expand in the future?

We’re committed to consistently advancing our projects, with a particular focus on involving project participants more closely. Initially, we wanted to ensure that, starting April 1st, all participants would record their working hours comprehensively across the various departments. Unfortunately, we hit our license limits, but we are working on resolving this issue.

The next important milestone is May 1st. By then, we want to establish a certain routine. Not everyone works with Blue Ant on a daily basis, so in the beginning, we need to regularly remind users and help make usage more habitual.

Another key focus is our software development. We use Microsoft Azure DevOps for planning and execution, but currently, there’s no direct connection between Azure DevOps and Blue Ant. Blue Ant automatically syncs only with Jira, which we don’t use. So we are in discussions to explore a possible integration between the two systems.

The goal is for developers to maintain their data in just one system. It’s particularly important for us that they continue to make effort estimates and record actual times in their primary tool, DevOps. These data should then be automatically and aggregated in Blue Ant, giving us a clear overview in project management without needing to dive into the details of individual tasks.

This will certainly remain an important topic this year. Collaboration with the various departments has generated increased interest, especially among those still working with Microsoft Project. They want to take a closer look at our solution. This could create a “lighthouse” effect, gradually integrating more departments into the platform. The more projects run through it, the better the transparency at top management level about what’s happening in the company.

One last question to round things off: How satisfied are you with our colleagues in support and consulting? What has your experience been like

Our relationship has been extremely collegial. After a short time, we were all on a first-name basis, and it felt like we were a well-coordinated team. Despite the distance to Berlin, you hardly noticed any gap, at most occasionally the dialect. The collaboration really worked well. We had regular exchange formats, usually meeting once a week at a fixed time to discuss current topics and follow up by the next session. If something was urgent, someone was always available, and even during implementation, there were just one or two minor questions. Normally, these would have gone to a consultant, but we passed them to support instead. Within a few hours, help was already provided. If things continue like this, we are really satisfied.

And we're confident it will continue just like this! Thank you very much for the interview!

(Customer review from 2024)