Developing an outsourcing questionnaire: validation study

Most developed countries have witnessed a sharp increase in outsourcing operations.These operations range from the service sector to manufacturing of various components such asautomotive components. However, many organisations practicing outsourcing are failing to achievetheir objectives for a number of reasons. In depth literature search has revealed that weaknesses inoutsourcing operations are due to a large number of defects in aspects ranging from ‘order request’ to‘invoice payment confirmation’. Analysis has shown that lack of quality in the outsourcing system isthe predominant reason for weaknesses in the outsourcing operations. During the literature review, itwas established that most of the data available on outsourcing was related to non-UK companies. Inview of this information, it is crucial to develop a questionnaire to acquire information related tooutsourcing from UK based companies. The Questionnaire is used to find out if any other newlygenerated problems are contributing to the poor quality of the outsourcing system resulting in failure.This paper presents an overview of outsourcing weaknesses/defects acquired through the literaturesearch and a step by step process preparing a questionnaire to investigate the weaknesses in theoutsourcing system and operations. The questionnaire is designed with a rational to measure thefrequency of the quality defects in the outsourcing system. As such they are best aimed at collectingdata to improve the framework.