SWISS
The Story
Swiss International Air Lines (SWISS) is the national airline of Switzerland and part of the Lufthansa Group. Operating in a highly competitive and complex aviation environment, SWISS has been advancing its digital capabilities to improve operational efficiency, customer experience, and automation across its services.
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. A central focus area has been the Claim Automation ART, aiming to increase end-to-end automation, reduce manual handling, and improve customer satisfaction in disruption and compensation processes.
Our Contributions to SWISS
Claim Automation ART
Digital Hangar, Home of Agile and Cultural Journey
Claim Automation ART
As part of the Digital Hangar, we supported teams within the Claim Automation Agile Release Train (ART) to strengthen delivery performance, team effectiveness, and alignment with strategic objectives.
Over the course of one year, one of the teams in 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 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, enabling 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 and DevOps health
Monthly reporting, 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, and increased efficiency within the same cost base, strengthening SWISS’s ability to scale its digital initiatives in a complex operational environment.
Digital Hangar, Home of Agile and Cultural Journey
Within SWISS, the Digital Hangar plays a central role as the engine for digital innovation across the airline, bringing together 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, which defines and evolves the Agile Operating Model, including roles, responsibilities, and ways of working for teams and leadership. It ensures consistency across teams while allowing for flexibility in execution. Our work operated within this framework, supporting teams in translating the 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, 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 (structure and delivery engine)
Home of Agile (operating model and governance)
Cultural Journey (mindset and behavior)
we ensured that improvements at the team level were not isolated, but aligned with the broader organizational transformation.
This alignment was critical in enabling sustainable impact. Teams were not only improving delivery metrics, but also evolving how they collaborate, make decisions, and take ownership, reinforcing the long-term transformation of SWISS within the Lufthansa Group.
