Cut costs. Boost marketing.

These appear to be Sprint Nextel’s primary twin goals at the moment, William Power, an analyst with Robert W. Baird & Co., reports this morning.

“Sprint has increased marketing over the past several months to improve subscriber results, while remaining focused on its liquidity to cover future debt requirements,” Power wrote in a research note.

Bob Brust, Sprint’s chief financial officer, met with investors Monday during a gathering Baird organized.

The previously announced 8,000 job cuts are moving along and Sprint leaders expect most of the actions to be completed by the end of March.

We have reported that Sprint executives are considering additional moves that could shift thousands of network jobs to other companies in outsourcing contracts. Some other news outlets recently reported that such moves were imminent, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.

“Despite recent speculation regarding possibly outsourcing at least part of network operations, a deal does not appear to be imminent,” Power wrote.

As for the job cuts, Sprint representatives said the company is going through a systematic process considering ongoing employment needs division by division.

“The goal is sometime around mid-March to let most folks know their fate,” said James Fisher, a Sprint spokesman.

The company reported a total of about 56,000 workers at the end of 2008, a number expected to drop to about 48,000.

In the Kansas City area, Sprint employed about 12,000 at the end of last year.

Sprint will continue to maintain a significant presence in the Washington, D.C., area, Fisher said. Reston, Va., was the former headquarters of Nextel Communications and initially served as the corporate headquarters of the combined company following Sprint’s 2005 purchase of Nextel.

In these latest moves, Sprint is shifting some units from the East Coast back to Overland Park.

Some key accounting functions, for example, are moving from Reston to Kansas, Fisher said. Some of these moves will not necessarily be completed by the end of March.

“The transfer would happen in a way that we could insure the strongest financial controls and strongest financial continuity,” Fisher said. “There are some folks who were doing accounting functions in Reston who will remain until later this spring.”