Lufthansa Group
The Story
Lufthansa Group is one of the world's leading aviation groups and the largest airline group in Europe. Through its airlines and aviation businesses, the Group serves millions of customers worldwide and operates a complex network of operations, technology platforms, and customer services.
To remain competitive in an increasingly digital world, Lufthansa Group has invested heavily in digital transformation, agile ways of working, and cultural evolution. Through initiatives such as the Digital Hangar, the Home of Agile, and the Cultural Journey, the Group is building the capabilities, operating models, and mindsets required to accelerate innovation, improve customer experience, and deliver sustainable business outcomes across its organisations.
Within this context, the Digital Hangar was established as a key driver of digital innovation, bringing together cross-functional Agile teams to deliver scalable, high-impact solutions. One of our key areas of contribution was the Claim Automation Agile Release Train (ART), which focuses on increasing end-to-end automation, reducing manual handling, and improving customer satisfaction throughout disruption and compensation processes.
Contributions to Digital Hangar
Claim Automation ART
Digital Hangar, Home of Agile at SWISS and Cultural Journey
Claim Automation ART
As part of the Claim Automation Agile Release Train (ART), we supported teams in strengthening delivery performance, team effectiveness, and alignment with strategic objectives.
Over the course of one year, a team within the ART significantly increased its delivery capacity, doubling its average output from 23 to 46 story points across four Program Increments (PIs). At the same time, the ART improved its end-to-end automation rate from 3% to 14%, representing a 4.5x increase in its primary business outcome metric.
These improvements were not driven by cost increases, but by unlocking higher productivity within the existing structure. Key enablers included:
Strengthening focus on Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)
Increasing ownership and accountability across team members
Building psychological safety to enable open collaboration
Improving team dynamics and ways of working
Encouraging early and frequent releases to production
Expanding automation test coverage to improve quality and speed
Our contribution focused on enabling these shifts through coaching, facilitation, and mentoring across roles, including engineers, testers, business analysts, and product owners. The goal was to embed sustainable behaviors that improve both delivery performance and team health.
Ways of Working and Operational Effectiveness
A key focus was improving how teams operate within the Agile Operating Model. This included supporting:
Better flow of work by reducing parallel work and encouraging teams to focus on fewer items at a time
More realistic planning, limiting overcommitment and aligning work with actual capacity
Increased transparency of metrics, reinforcing data-driven decision-making
Stronger cross-role collaboration, reducing silos and improving shared ownership
By shifting from fragmented and overloaded ways of working toward more focused and collaborative approaches, teams were able to significantly reduce lead times and improve predictability.
Scaling Impact Through Alignment and Measurement
We also emphasized the importance of aligning team-level work with ART and value stream objectives. This included introducing structured approaches to measure success across different time horizons:
Yearly outcomes, such as automation rate and delivery capacity
Quarterly assessments, including Agile maturity, team effectiveness, and High-Performing Team development
Monthly alignments, providing visibility into performance, risks, and improvements
This multi-level alignment helped connect day-to-day team activities with broader business outcomes, ensuring that improvements in delivery translated into measurable value for the organization.
Building the Foundation for Sustainable Performance
Our work highlighted that sustainable performance improvement requires clarity in both operating model and expectations. Where alignment on Agile principles and ways of working was strong, teams were better able to translate strategy into execution and outcomes.
Additionally, the experience reinforced the importance of clearly defining how roles such as Team Coaches are evaluated, ensuring shared understanding of success criteria and enabling more consistent impact across teams.
Impact
Through these efforts, the Claim Automation ART achieved:
A 2x increase in delivery capacity within one year
A 4.5x increase in automation rates
Improved team collaboration, ownership, and transparency
Reduced inefficiencies in ways of working and delivery flow
These improvements contributed to faster delivery, higher quality outcomes, increased automation, and greater operational efficiency within the same cost base, supporting Lufthansa Group’s broader digital transformation ambitions.
The combination of stronger delivery capabilities, improved collaboration, and greater alignment between strategy and execution created a foundation for sustainable performance improvements that can continue to scale over time.
Digital Hangar, Home of Agile at SWISS and Cultural Journey
Within Lufthansa Group, the Digital Hangar plays a central role as the engine for digital innovation across the airline, bringing together Value Streams, Agile Release Trains (ARTs), cross-functional teams, and product-driven delivery. It provides the structural foundation for scaling Agile across the organization and enabling faster, more customer-centric digital solutions.
A key enabler of this setup is the Home of Agile at SWISS, which enables and evolves the Agile Operating Model, including roles, responsibilities, and ways of working for teams and leadership within SWISS. It creates shared understanding of Agile principles and ways of working while allowing teams to adapt them to their specific context. Our contribution included knowledge-sharing initiatives, communities of practice, training sessions, and Lean Coffee events that helped teams translate the Agile Operating Model into daily behaviors, collaboration patterns, and delivery outcomes.
In parallel, the broader Lufthansa Group Cultural Journey provides the cultural backbone for transformation across the group. It emphasizes topics such as psychological safety, peer feedback, decision-making, and leadership evolution. These cultural elements closely align with high-performing team principles and were reinforced through practical team-level interventions.
By connecting these three layers:
Digital Hangar (operating model and delivery engine)
Home of Agile at SWISS (knowledge sharing and co-creation spaces)
Cultural Journey (mindset and behavior)
we ensured that improvements at the team level were not isolated, but aligned with the broader organizational transformation.
Together, these initiatives helped strengthen the connection between strategy, culture, and execution, creating the conditions for sustainable organizational agility and continuous improvement across the Lufthansa Group.
