Motorola Separation

The Challenge

After more than 80 years as a leading global communications solutions provider, Motorola had grown to over 50,000 employees and $20 billion in revenue. Strategically, however, the company was serving two distinct market and customer segments. Therefore, Motorola decided to undertake a multi-year, multi-phased enterprise-wide initiative to divide its business into two standalone companies: one largely focused on the consumer market and one on enterprise and government customers. The company sought a trusted partner with sufficient skills and experience to work collaboratively with them. Due to Slalom's demonstrated delivery capabilities and familiarity with Motorola’s operations, organization and personnel, Motorola chose Slalom to fulfill key roles in multiple functional workteams as well as the corporate PMO which led the overall effort.

Our Approach

Overall, the Separation Program was organized in a matrix fashion that included 13 major work teams consisting of 119 sub-teams across the Business, IT and Enterprise areas.

Slalom collaborated with Motorola by bringing to the program experienced PMO and PM personnel seeded in key positions in the IT PMO, IT workstreams, and Business/Functional workstreams. Senior PMO and PMs were expected to:

• Implement processes, tools and procedures to improve effectiveness while minimizing unnecessary overhead and effort
• Serve as the only non-Motorola leader on the small, overall Corporate PMO team in areas of overall program execution, governance and processes
• Drive overall IT interdependencies and financial tracking
• Manage plans and execution for IT Legal, IT Supply Chain, Functional Finance and Functional Supply Chain global teams
• Manage integration of and architecture considerations for the Service & Repair organizations as they were impacted by the Separation

The Results

Motorola, with Slalom’s contribution, successfully executed its separation on Jan. 4, 2011, completing the largest single transaction in the company’s more than 80-year history.

Over the course of the program, the Slalom team worked side-by-side with their Motorola sponsors and teams, which was key to Slalom’s approach and delivery capability, as well as a key point of value and differentiation recognized by Motorola. Our resource knowledge and leadership experience enabled our team to actively contribute in value-added ways that further enabled our sponsors by having trusted advisors and contributors.

Our work further confirmed and broadened Motorola’s perspective on the strength of our PM capabilities, as well as exposed many more organizations, clients and locations to Slalom’s delivery excellence. The team:

• Defined key metrics to monitor progress and provide visibility to the Executive Steering Committee and Senior Leadership
• Defined and managed cross-program issue and risk reporting, including leadership and escalation paths
• Collaborated with personnel across the company, from executives to all levels of team membership
• Identified and executed on key dependencies and critical paths across over 100 work plans and close to 6,000 deliverables