Case study: Motorola Iridium

To help you understand the difference between project management success and project success, you will now explore a real case study: the Motorola Iridium.

Motorola was an American multinational telecommunications company founded in Illinois on 25th September 1928. The company developed during the 1930s and 1940s and grew after the Second World War. Motorola was well known for being a technologically advanced company.

In September 1983, the US Federal Communications Commission approved the DynaTAC 8000X telephone: the world's first commercial cellular device. In the 1980s, Motorola was a leading company in the mobile industry with a very talented team of engineers.

Our case study begins in 1985 when the wife of one of Motorola’s engineers complained that she was unable to reach clients on her mobile phone when she was in the Bahamas. Her husband envisioned a technology that would allow effortless communication from and to anywhere in the world. His idea was to create a network of low orbiting satellites covering the entire orbit of the earth. He planned to link them with mesh technology for routing calls to and from any point in the world.

Work started on the project in 1987.

While satellite phones were available in the 1980s, they had limited global coverage and the transmission and receiving delay made a conversation sound as though you were speaking down a long tunnel. Motorola thought that the world was ready for something better, and proposed creating a massive network of satellites that would provide global coverage.

This was a major project. The initial cost of the project was estimated at several billion US dollars and part of the work involved putting 77 satellites into low earth orbit. It is because of this number of satellites, that the project was named ‘Iridium’ after the 77th element in the periodic table.

This was a very expensive project and therefore Motorola asked its engineers to optimise the technology to reduce costs. Motorola’s engineers made the satellite system more efficient by using only 66 satellites. This redesign reduced the cost of installing the satellites. Motorola decided to keep the name Iridium instead of changing it to element 66 — dysprosium.

Motorola started launching the satellites early in 1997 and this was completed by 1998. They launched them from launching pads in Kazakhstan, China and America. From December 1998 Iridium services began operating.

Although this was a very complex project with many technological challenges, it worked perfectly and it was an amazing technological achievement. We do not know the precise figures but they most likely delivered the project on time and on budget.

Please refer to the glossary to check any terminology you are unfamiliar with: Glossary of Project Management Terms

Coming up...

In the next section you will have the opportunity to evaluate the Motorola project in discussion with your peers.