Professor John Dalrymple

Biography

John Dalrymple JM PhD BA (Hons):
John holds a BA (Hons) from the University of Stirling and a PhD from the University of Strathclyde in Scotland. Before coming to Australia in 1997, John was a Research Fellow and then Lecturer at the University of Strathclyde before moving to the University of Stirling as a Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Head of Department of Management Science. In 1989, along with colleagues, John established the Scottish Quality Management Centre at the University of Stirling to provide a focus for research, commercial activity, consultancy and as a base for the development of undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the field of quality management. The Centre worked extensively with the Scottish Enterprise Foundation to support and improve the performance of small and medium-sized companies in Central Scotland. The Centre also played a leading part in the development of quality in public sector organisations and became the largest such Centre in Europe.
John was invited to Australia to take up the position of Founding Director of the Centre for Management Quality Research and Professor of Quality Management at RMIT University. John built the Centre into a very productive academic research unit generating significant research output and a number of successful research higher degree completions. John pioneered the use of the UK Benchmarking Index in Australia, a business profile benchmarking instrument that provides a comprehensive set of some eighty measures of performance for small and medium-sized companies. John used the instrument to identify performance improvement opportunities for company operations and worked with companies and partners to improve competitiveness of companies in Northern Metropolitan Melbourne. The instrument has subsequently been adopted by the Commonwealth Government Enterprise Connect program as part of their comprehensive business review process for small and medium-sized companies.
John attracted over one million pounds sterling in research funding from the UK Science and Engineering Research Council to engage with industry partners in Knowledge Transfer Partnerships, a program designed to enable knowledge transfer from academia to industry to improve industrial performance and transfer real understanding of industrial and commercial performance improvement into the academic and lecture theatre environment.
Under John's leadership, the Centre for Management Quality Research at RMIT University attracted some $3million in funding, produced many journal articles, conference papers and research higher degree completions. John and the staff and students of the Centre were regular recipients of 'Best Paper' awards at international conferences. He was also recognised by the Asia Pacific Business Excellence Standard Academy with an individual award for excellence in 2006. John was the Editor of Quality Assurance in Education, a journal published by the European academic publishing house, Emerald from 2003 until 2019. In that time, the journal developed from a small, predominantly UK - centric journal to a renowned and highly respected international journal
John received an RMIT University Award for Research Supervision in 2006 and, in 2010, he supervised four Doctoral Candidates to completion. He has now supervised over twenty PhD candidates to successful completion. In October 2018, John was presented with the J M Juran Award by the Australian Organisation for Quality.  Part of the Citation states: "Professor Dalrymple's career is a reflection of that of Dr Juran. A thought leader who not onle rsearches Quality, but who reaches beyond into the application of Quality knowledge in practice and develops a generation of thought leaders to expand and continue the work."