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. This includes initiatives such as the Digital Hangar, the Home of Agile, and the Cultural Journey, which together aim to strengthen customer focus, innovation, and business outcomes.
Within this context, we contributed to the transformation of the Claim Automation Agile Release Train (ART), helping translate strategic intent into measurable improvements in delivery performance, automation, and customer outcomes.
Our Contributions
Digital Hangar
Home of Agile at SWISS
Cultural Journey
Claim Automation ART
Digital Hangar, Home of Agile at SWISS and Cultural Journey
The Digital Hangar provides the organisational foundation for digital innovation across Lufthansa Group. It brings together Value Streams, Agile Release Trains (ARTs), cross-functional teams, and product-centric delivery, enabling the Group to organise around customer value and accelerate the delivery of digital products and services.
Complementing this, the Lufthansa Group Cultural Journey strengthens the behaviours needed for sustainable transformation, including psychological safety, collaborative decision-making, peer feedback, continuous learning, and shared ownership.
Within this environment, the Home of Agile at SWISS supports the evolution of the Agile Operating Model by building capabilities, sharing knowledge, and enabling collaboration through communities of practice, training sessions, and Lean Coffee events.
Together, these elements created the conditions for teams to align strategy, ways of working, and culture around a common objective: delivering better outcomes for customers.
Claim Automation ART
Working within this transformation environment, we supported teams in the Claim Automation Agile Release Train to strengthen ownership, team dynamics, delivery performance, cross-functional collaboration, and alignment with strategic objectives.
Our work focused on helping teams translate the Agile Operating Model into daily behaviours through coaching, facilitation, mentoring, and capability building across engineers, testers, business analysts, product owners, and other stakeholders.
A strong emphasis was placed on decision-making, peer feedback, transparency, data-driven metrics, and cross-functional communication, ensuring that work, dependencies, risks, and outcomes were visible and could be actively managed.
This was not about Agile for its own sake. The objective was to improve commercial performance, productivity, and customer outcomes. By maintaining a clear focus on customer value and using Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to create alignment, teams were able to make better prioritisation decisions, swarm around the most valuable work, improve flow, and accelerate automation.
Over the course of one year, a team within the ART doubled its average delivery capacity from 23 to 46 story points across four Program Increments (PIs). At the same time, the ART improved its end-to-end claim automation rate from 3% to 14%, representing a 4.5x improvement in one of its primary business outcome metrics.
These improvements were enabled by stronger culture and team dynamics, alongside improvements in ways of working, without increasing the cost base.
Impact
The impact went beyond delivery capacity. Stronger cross-functional communication, greater transparency, shared ownership, clear roles and responsibilities, decision-making protocols, and data-driven ways of working helped improve flow, predictability, and quality.
Through these efforts:
Delivery capacity increased 2x within one year
End-to-end claim automation increased 4.5x, from 3% to 14%
Transparency and cross-functional communication improved
Teams strengthened ownership and collaboration
Flow, predictability, and operational efficiency improved
Teams maintained a stronger focus on commercial, productivity, and customer outcomes
Ultimately, these improvements enabled teams to deliver more valuable outcomes more efficiently, supporting Lufthansa Group's objectives for increased productivity, operational efficiency, and customer experience.
By connecting strategy, organisational design, culture, and execution, the Digital Hangar created an environment where continuous improvement could translate into measurable value for both the business and its customers.
