Mattias Skarin works as a Lean and Kanban coach, building systems that enables you to cut time to market and improve quality. He has helped several software teams deliver with confidence, scaled Scrum over multiple teams (cutting game cycle time from 24 months to 4) and improved life at operations using Kanban. He is an author of the book, Kanban and Scrum – making the most of both, and regularly train and coach in Lean, Kanban and TDD. He blogs on http://blog.crisp.se/mattiasskarin and the blog has one of the best set of sample Kanban boards on the planet.
Mattius is one of thought leaders of the Kanban Movement and is speaking at the upcoming Lean Kanban Central Europe Conference (It is in Hamburg, Germany, Nov 4-5, 2013). He is speaking about: Improving the full value chain & Visualization – What‘s my brain got to do with it? (Lightning Talk)
An excerpt from an upcoming podcast:
Mattias: Oh absolutely, I’m currently discussing using some of these tools (Kanban & Scrum) in marketing, and I’ve used it in sales, I’ve used it in support so definitely, these tools do not just stop in software.
Joe: When I try to use a Kanban board in marketing, I struggle becasue marketing is very event driven, it always seems like the calendar overrides the Kanban board. 
Mattias: Well, that’s true, but what Kanban will help out with is saying alright we accept the fact that prioritization can change very, very quickly, like daily but we still have the focus of the work that we start. We make sure that we complete it, but we allow prioritization to shift at any point of time, and that’s just natural in our environment.
Joe: If prioritization is changing all the time, it moves away from completing an iteration. It’s even difficult to get an iteration within Kanban because Kanban seems to be a linear process. Can you elaborate on that thinking for me and how that works together?
Mattias: Even inside an iteration there are definitely linear steps. There are steps that you take to make sure the iteration is complete. This is the same if you would think of Development and using Scrum. There typically are the steps that guarantee you get a high quality output, but there’s more, I’d like to say that there are more ways to deal with uncertainty; iteration is not the only way. If you have a very uncertain situation, for example, you might not know what solution that will work or what type of marketing message that the customer will buy into. Another way to approach it is to do set base design, so you run a multiple set of experiments in parallel, and then you evaluate really quickly which one works. Then you continue on with the ones that actually did work. This set base design is, I generally think, is an underused mechanism in our organizations, whereas, we are getting pretty familiar with using iterations but set base design can be as quick, or even more effective if deployed correctly.
Joe: It’s taking a PDCA cycle and we do Plan Do Check Act but when we look at Plan, Do, Check, Act that’s basically a linear progression but when we step back at it, it’s an iteration.
Mattias: Correct, I mean now you could see iteration as a way to evaluate 10 parallel experiments and then say okay, so we did 10 experiments, which one of these worked. So each experiment would be a PDCA, but you would have a PDCA on all the 10 experiments. Running them in parallel actually buys you time because if you didn’t run them in parallel, you would have to run one after the other and the question becomes which way is the fastest way to discover, or roll through this uncertainty.
Related Information:
Set- Base Design: Toyota’s Principles of Set-Based Concurrent Engineering