Goal setting analysis You have interviewed an executive of a company that provides outsourced services.

What key insights can you get from the following excerpt of your interview about setting and communicating goals of outsourcing?

Our strategy was not to obtain a key client and leverage the knowledge to service others.
We started out with a couple of large clients, and we started out without several key analysis tools, of course, and in the course of serving those clients we found more ways that we could drive continuous improvement, and ways that we could drive out the rate of errors internally.
We could be faster and more responsive to our clients. We said, for example, “You know we need a tool that is better than Excel to plan out the initial draft of the course-teaching schedule for the next sequence. If you look at University of XYZ, you will probably find that the initial planning when a professor is going to teach a class, time of day, what room, and what courses, the initial planning is probably done on Excel... And eventually somebody keys data into a system after you have agreed, after facilities have agreed, key data into a system that eventually students can enroll on. It’s a nightmare because of all the issues with conflicts and coordination of changes. If you get more than one person doing the scheduling, they are at each other’s throats. And within our company it could be multiple clients that we’re trying to serve with the same facilities and resources. It’s all about managing the facilitator’s times effectively. We threw out the Excel spreadsheets, and we built a tool that has a database underneath it, and Web-style interfaces that all of our schedulers can use. We have made those investments as we have seen the need, and we have reached the scale to be able to afford it. And again there is no way an individual university or client could build a tool like that and have it be cost effective, unless you “enslaved” grad students in the IT department to do it (laughs). And then you have the problem of maintaining it.