In this breakdown of the series ‘The Mars Outpost’, I do a walkthrough of the entire series and relate them back to the real world.

This episode highlights the importance of the concepts of WFM and how essential it is, to have some or all of the concepts of WFM working in your business to identify risks and use them to plan for similar events that could happen in the future.

The last transmission recording of the specific set-up challenges faced by the WFM team on Mars.

The WFM didn’t just do the same thing over again expecting a different result, they analysed their data which included the decisions and impacts of those decisions to improve their planning for the second arrival.

With the arrival of the second group, the workforce has grown but now has a mix of skilled and unskilled resources. The question of efficiency and effectiveness comes into play - it isn’t one or the other, our WFM used shrinkage and speed to production concepts to overcome this challenge.

After celebrations from harvesting the first successful batch of crops, work continued and we found instances of ‘avoidance’ taking place. Typically the ‘human nature’ of finding shortcuts followed us to Mars and our WFM had to find solutions.

At this point, our WFM team went from loved for being able to keep everything on plan to being frowned upon for calling out performance issues and enforcing rules.

We’ve had to implement some new metrics to help guide and direct both mining and farming operations to run smoothly.

Our team baselined tasks using Time and Motion studies to develop an acceptable AHT and then went on to introduce an Occupancy metric. These in turn helped with allocation of resources and guidance on production levels to maintain a consistent output.

After work got underway on the mining and farming operations, there were some performance challenges, some of which was only evident after being put in the real life situation - similar to that of staff going live onto calls from training and feeling overwhelmed.

On Mars, our WFM team created solutions by cross-skilling our resources after comparing the results of new assessments done in the live environment to the results of the training assessments done on Earth.

Arrival of the first group of humans on Mars and the challenges faced once they landed.

The WFM team got into action displaying real-time contingencies to mitigate risks to the new arrivals and adjusting and adapting their existing resources in real-time to prevent risks to existing personal.

A prologue into the upcoming six part series called ‘The Mars Outpost’.