Agility in Motion: Transforming Airline Tech Teams with Agile Pods

One of the world’s largest airlines wanted to improve agility and ensure a seamless omni-channel experience for its customers. A more agile, yet stable technology infrastructure could support personalization and drive lifetime value for the customers. As part of this agility initiative, the airline decided to move its technology infrastructure to the cloud.

Challenges 

To meet this objectives, the airline needed to accelerate software development and efficiency to continue to meet customers’ changing, individual needs — and to do so faster than competitors. These initiatives were top-tier digital transformation projects and had strong CEO support.

Traditional waterfall software development life cycle (SDLC) processes were too slow to deliver high-quality applications and updates quickly, making it difficult to meet modern demands for speed and agility. Thus, the airline was looking for help not only in migration to native cloud environments but also in the use of Agile squads and processes to greatly speed up application development.

Our solution 

The airline had previously partnered with Pyramid Consulting for staff augmentation in software development. For the new requirements, however, it was recognized that they needed a managed services solution via our technology solutions business division.

Given the strength of our proposal, Celsior was engaged as a managed services partner for moving from a waterfall software development lifecycle to an Agile squad / POD methodology including Scrum management. The airline gave us the primary responsibility for development, engineering (CI/CD), quality engineering (QE), deployment and support of the airline’s booking, check-in, and flight status website and mobile app. The talent division’s staff augmentation consultants also played a key role in the development of airport kiosk check-in.

We used an Agile Product Oriented Delivery (POD) model, in the form of Teams-as-a-Service, in which cross-functional teams worked collaboratively on Sprint-based application development. This started with two Agile delivery squads handling application development and enhancement services.  Over time, it grew into eight PODs each composed of a Scrum Master, Product Owners, Full Stack Developers, and Quality Engineering (QE).  The POD model offered a variety of advantages including cross-functional collaboration, efficient communication, aligned goals and priorities, faster iterations, and early inclusion of QE engineers for higher-quality deliverables.

The PODs were made up of a combination of senior and mid-level personnel with onshore, entry-level personnel who were custom trained for the client by Pyramid Consulting’s training solutions business division, GenSpark. The entry-level personnel were trained over 12 weeks to meet specific needs and then worked on assignments for 12-18 months. At the end of the assignment, 80% of these personnel transitioned to become full-time employees due to their significant contributions.

To optimize efficiency and cost, a hybrid work model was used with Celsior personnel distributed between the U.S. and India.  Based on the model’s success, the total number of Pyramid Consulting personnel supporting the client at any one time grew to approximately 120.

As cloud was a major objective for the client, we developed serverless applications, modernized microservices, and cloud-ready containers.  We also migrated databases from Oracle to cloud-based PostgreSQL. From a data integration standpoint, we developed and deployed seven large cloud-native APIs on AWS, using Postman and Swagger for API development and migration.  For an organization that is highly focused on APIs, this was their largest cloud-native API development project and was deemed quite successful.

The SLA framework was built around an Agile, sprint-based delivery model, where payments were tied to outcomes—specifically, when code was deployed to production. To align with the client’s goal of staying ahead in a fast-moving market, sprints were completed every 80 hours. Achieving this level of speed and flexibility would not have been possible under the traditional waterfall SDLC.

Business outcomes 

The project has now been underway for approximately four years and results have been impressive.

At the beginning of 2024, the company’s CEO reported to the investment community that “Our digital investments continue as we work to increase our agility and provide…customers with a more seamless experience. Customers visited company’s mobile application over 1 billion times last year, using our self-service tools almost 10 times more often than 2019, with much higher overall satisfaction.” 

At the company’s Investor Day in November 2024, the company’s CEO told investors that the airline had provided a better user experience through “simplifying the purchasing process [for flyers] and improving experience in all channels.”  The idea of providing a strong, seamless omni-channel experience regardless of whether customers were interacting with the company through the web, mobile app, or airport kiosk goes to the heart of what Pyramid has helped provide.  This customer-focused, omni-channel experience is so important to the airline that one analyst said that the comments of the company’s CEO and president sounded “more like omnichannel retailers than an airline.”

Pyramid Consulting has been a significant participant in the client’s infrastructure migration to native AWS cloud. That work is now mostly complete, and the CEO stated that this migration was key to accelerating its improved user experience, as well as new initiatives such as artificial intelligence.

At a more granular level, the benefits were:

• Cost savings over traditional SDLC, earlier defect detection, and improved user feedback and acceptance
• Reduced risk through end-to-end visibility of the sprint development pipeline for airline product owners and internal business groups
• Greater transparency, cost predictability and partner accountability to the airline through the outcome-based, fixed-fee, managed-capacity contract

From the beginning of the relationship, the contract was structured as a partial Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT Lite) with portions of the delivery team transferred back to the client after each year of operation.  This provided not only personnel transfer, but more importantly knowledge transfer.

For the past year, the managed services contract has been transformed into a staff augmentation contract, taking advantage once again of the multiple engagement models offered by Pyramid Consulting. From a business standpoint, these transfers of personnel and intellectual property to the airline have given the company the benefits of Pyramid Consulting’s knowledge and talent without the lock-in that comes with too many service providers.

Clearly the benefits of our relationship have been one of the keys to the airline’s ability to provide an industry-leading customer experience— according to the J. D. Powers North America Airline Satisfaction Study.