McElroy Used As Project Management Case Study
Austin, Texas - September 2006 McElroy Translation, a provider of localization and translation services, is used as a case study to illustrate the importance of organizational culture in Dr. Harold Kerzner’s latest book, Project Management Best Practices: Achieving Global Excellence, published in July. Project management is shown to be an integral component of strategic best practices for continuous improvement.
Dr. Kerzner begins his introduction to the chapter on culture with “Perhaps the most significant characteristic of companies that are excellent in project management is their culture.” We agree with his assessment that a successful company culture is designed to adapt quickly to a dynamic environment.
According to Shelly Priebe, General Manager at McElroy, “McElroy's company culture is unique in several ways. (1) We keep good people. (2) Project management as a company culture is emphasized to eliminate information silos. (3) ‘Setting the Industry Standard in Customer Satisfaction’ is not marketing hype. It is a vision that our employees own and vest themselves in every day. All of these elements inextricably entwine to design a cultural fingerprint that is uniquely ‘McElroy.’ Entrepreneurial energy and process improvement ideas surge from the ground up to continually improve our customer's experience.”
Harold Kerzner (Ph.D., MS, Engineering and MBA) is Senior Executive Director with International Institute for Learning, Inc. and Professor of Systems Management at Baldwin-Wallace College. He is an expert in the areas of project management, total quality management, and strategic planning.
Tina Wuelfing Cargile, PMP®, attended a seminar in 2005 featuring Harold Kerzner in which he discussed a recent text in some detail. From Tina, “Dr. Kerzner, an authoritative figure in the project management community, continues to push the envelope in the evolution of project management as a profession as well as its role in the modern corporation, specifically the concept of Project Management Maturity--integrating PM education principles into every aspect of the corporation. This concept is one that McElroy Translation has conceptualized and put into practice over the past decade, where the decentralization of project management expertise has led to its transformation into one of the nimblest, most responsive, and creative players in the localization industry.
“Dr. Kerzner's latest text, intended as an adjunct to Applied Project Management: Best Practices on Implementation, delves deeper into case studies and hands-on experience in the practice of project management at some of the world's most successful corporations. What I find so exciting is the consistency of experience in this forward-thinking approach across such a broad spectrum of corporate settings.”
