University of TexasSomewhere is the outreach campus of the University of Texas system. Its mission is to

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Question:

University of Texas–Somewhere is the outreach campus of the University of Texas system. Its mission is to extend high-quality education to people who are not necessarily “college students” in the usual sense. The Management Institute is one of the departments within UT–Somewhere.

It conducts programs aimed at providing education and training in at least a dozen areas of business and not-for-profit management.

The supervisory training area within the Management Institute designs and conducts continuing education training programs for first-level supervisors. The training programs are designed to improve a trainee’s managerial, communication, decision-making, and human-relation skills. They consequently cover a broad range of topics.

A continuing decline in enrollments in the various programs during the past several years had become a problem of increasing concern to the three supervisory program directors. They were at a loss to explain the decline, although informal discussions among the supervisors raised a number of questions to which they did not know the answers. Have people’s reasons for attending supervisory training programs changed? What are their reasons for attending them? Was the decline caused by economic factors? Was it because of increased competition among continuing education providers? Was it due to the content or structure of Management Institute’s programs themselves? Was it because of the way the programs were structured or promoted? Were the programs targeted at the right level of supervisor?

Typically, the major promotion for any program involved mailed brochures that described the content and structure of the course. The mailing list for the brochures was all past attendees of any supervisory training program conducted by the Management Institute.

What is the manager’s decision problem? Is this problem discovery- or strategy-oriented?

What are some relevant research problems?

Which research problem would you recommend pursuing? Why?

How would you recommend Management Institute go about addressing this research problem? That is, what data would you collect and how might those data be used to answer the research question posed?