  Shear viscosity is a crucial property of QCD matter which determines the
collective behavior of the the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) in ultrarelativistic
heavy-ion collisions. Extending the near-equilibrium, high-precision
investigations in theory and experiment, we take into account the fact that, in
a collision, the QGP is generated far from equilibrium. We use the AdS/CFT
correspondence to study a strongly coupled plasma and find a significant impact
on the ratio of shear viscosity to entropy density, $\eta/s$. In particular, we
investigate the initial heating phase and find a decrease reaching down to
below 60% followed by an overshoot to 110% of the near-equilibrium value. This
finding might be highly relevant for the extraction of transport coefficients
from anisotropic flow measurements at RHIC and LHC.
