PingAn is a large Chinese insurance company that started using Kanban in 2011 when its property insurance department was unhappy with long lead times of 2 months. An initial agile experiment reduced lead times to 3 weeks and increased online car insurance sales 15-fold within 8 months. PingAn then scaled Kanban adoption to more teams and evolved its use over time, applying Kanban at portfolio and CEO levels to manage variability, value streams, and the overall project portfolio. Kanban helped PingAn achieve more reliability, adaptability, and shorter end-to-end lead times across various parts of the organization.

1. Kanban @PingAn
Adam Wu
Agilean Consulting
Twitter: @adwu73
Email: wuqiong@agilean.cn

2. About PingAn Group
• Ranking 41st on the Global Fortune 500
• 2nd largest insurance group in China
• Biggest private owned company in China
• 1.2M employees in total
• More than 6000 IT staff

3. Our journey started from
an UNHAPPY business department of
PingAn Property Insurance in April 2011

4. Unhappy Business People
• Taobao Insurance can
deliver a feature within
2 weeks
• However, we have to
wait for 2 months
• WHY?!!

5. First Agile Experiment - A Radical Change
• The whole team, business & IT people, were moved in together,
incl. PMs, developers, testers etc.
• The role of Business/Software Analyst was eliminated,
therefore, the Product Manager can talk with developers
directly.
• The team started to manage and merge code on their own, no
more Configuration Managers exists, but the delivery turned out
to be better and faster.

6. Here Comes Astonishing Business Result
• Sales volume via website grew 15 times by the
end of 2011
• PingAn took over the leading position in the
online market for car insurance
• All this happened within 8 months
4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
2173 3063
8262
13092 13181
17870
27624
31365
32921

7. Happy ending of 1st experiment led to SCALING
requirement on team level.
However, copy & paste wouldn’t work for all teams
considering their contextual difference.
What should we DO?

8. Kanban Training for Team Leaders

9. Kanban Training for Internal Coaches

10. Advanced Training for Managers

11. Kanban Parade to Exchange Tips & Ideas

12. Allow Each Kanban to be Different……

13. Allow Each Kanban to be Different……

14. Encourage Team to Evolve Kanban after
Iteration (I/III/V)

15. Encourage Team to Evolve Kanban after
Iteration (VI/VIII/XI)

17. Using Kanban to ensure more
RELIABILITY and ADAPTIVITY of
different project delivery since 2012

18. Using Kanban to Avoid Scarcity Mood
• Relieve people from
overburden and multi-
tasking
• Stop starting, start
finishing
• Limit WIP
• Defer commitment

19. Why should We Avoid Scarcity Mood
Choose rich and poor people randomly for the
experiment. Before they taking 2 test, ask them
the question below.
“Your car is having some trouble and requires
$XX to be fixed. You can pay in full, take a
loan, or take a chance and forego the service
at the moment. How would you go about
making the decision? “

20. Test 1: Cognitive Capacity
• Raven’s matrices

21. Test 2: Executive Control

22. Easy Mode: Repair will Cost $150
• Not much concern caused for either rich or poor people

23. Hard Mode: Repair will Cost $1500
• Much more concern is caused for the poor, but not the rich.

24. Concl.: Scarcity Occupies People’s
Bandwidth
• Focusing on scarcity is involuntary.
• It fills our mind and results in less bandwidth for everything else.
• Bandwidth – what our brain can do.
• It’s our “computational capacity, ability to pay attention, to make good
decisions, to stick to our plans, and to resist temptations.”

25. Lead Time Shorten from 2 Months to 3 Weeks
PS: Sx is # for iteration (one iteration per week)
Each feature completed
dev, test & UAT within 3
weeks

26. Kanban Enhanced Adaptivity Greatly
60%
original features
got deployed
as planned 60%
40%
features with low
priority were
abandoned
40%
40%
features with high
priority were added
during delivery 40%
necessary
technical tasks
accomplished

27. Using Kanban with business people
to manage product VARIABILITY
since 2014

28. Typical Innovation Process for an Enterprise
Business leader presents
idea
BA/SA turns idea into
requirement
IT leader provides
estimation
Quality
Schedule
IdeaBudget
Quality
Schedule
FeatureBudget
Quality
Schedule
FeatureBudget

29. But, Variability Cannot Never Be Eliminated

30. How to Solve the Issue?
Leading the Variability into
Areas with Lower Cost

31. Always Lack of Variability in Budget Area
• In most companies, experienced stuff is a
scared resource. The success of new
projects can hardly rely on support from
using lots of experienced people.
• Adding new people to boost the size of the
project team is not recommended, since it
will always increase managing and
collaboration cost.
Quality
Schedule
FeatureBudget

32. Choosing Quality as Cheap Area is Not Wise
• People have got used to choose
quality as the “low cost” area.
• But it won’t be easy to
acknowledge this publicly.
• As a result, lots of projects are
doomed to fail from the day they
launched.
Quality
Schedule
FeatureBudget

33. Managing Variability via Managing Feature
List or Feature Details
Feature
Schedule
Budget
Details
Quality
Quality
Schedule
FeatureBudget
Quality
Schedule
FeatureBudget

34. What Should We Provide?
Business leader presents
idea
BA/SA turns idea into
requirement
IT leader provides
estimation
Quality
Schedule
IdeaBudget
Quality
Schedule
FeatureBudget
Quality
Schedule
Feature
Iteration
Plan
Budget

35. Here Comes Astonishing Business Result
• Sales volume via website grew 15 times by the
end of 2011
• PingAn took over the leading position in the
online market for car insurance
• All this happened within 8 months
4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
2173 3063
8262
13092 13181
17870
27624
31365
32921

36. 3-day Quick Start to Kick Off the Project

37. More than 350 User Stories

38. Brief Iteration Plan for next 3 Months

41. Using Kanban to manage
END-2-END value stream since 2015

42. Training for Business Managers

44. End-2-End Lead Time Shorten from 140 days to
80 days (PingAn Bank)
140
93
106
84.4 80
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
140
160
2015.09-10 2015.11-12 2016.01-02 2016.03 2016.04

45. Using CEO Level Kanban for
company portfolio management in 2016

46. Mapping the Company Value Stream

47. CEO Level Kanban (PingAn Fintech)

48. Kanban Adoption Journey of PingAn
• Our journey started from an UNHAPPY business department of PingAn Property
Insurance in April 2011
• 1st experiment achieved astonishing business result, with car insurance online sales volume
GROWING by 15 TIMES within 8 months
• Team level Kanban adoption started - “SCALING BY PULL”
• Ensuring more RELIABILITY and ADAPTIVITY of different project delivery since 2012
• Managing product VARIABILITY together with business people since 2014
• Managing END-2-END value stream since 2015
• CEO Level Kanban established for portfolio management in 2016

49. Software Dev is Heterogenous by Nature
• Different CoD (Cost of Delay)
• Different Size
• Different Complexity
• Different Staff Capability

50. On the Way along, We Noticed……
• Traditionally, we use a homogeneous process to manage tasks and people
• What is needed, however, is a heterogeneous ecosystem for the complex environment
• Kanban plays a significant role in the evolvement of this ecosystem, from a homogeneous
status into a heterogeneous model safely
• Starting with visualization of the working process, the difference emerges gradually, such
as value stream, class of service, replenishment / pull policy, definition of done, SLA etc.
• As we explore into it, more benefits achieved on business level and cultural level. Finally,
the whole organization peacefully reached its “harmonious way of surviving and evolving”.

51. Thank You!
Adam Wu
Agilean Consulting
Twitter: @adwu73
Email: wuqiong@agilean.cn