Synergy is the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It is the driver for nearly all product development efforts, the presumption behind most business mergers, and the motivation behind many top-down efforts that encourage independent groups to work together. But true synergy is not easy, free, or even possible without the right environment. Consider this cautionary note:

Nearly all new product development efforts are motivated by the belief that a common solution can be profitably developed to solve a problem which users need to have solved. Synergy initiatives attempt to extend this concept, and base their value proposition on two related beliefs: aggregation of needs from multiple domains will achieve greater economies of scale), and greater reuse of knowledge and assets can be applied to service those needs more effectively (typically by being smarter at avoiding sources of unnecessary cost, removing redundant solutions and excess capacity, and by exploiting the best available solutions and strategies available within the community). The elements targetted for this reuse can take many forms, including the sharing of tools, technology, processes, concepts, components, people, and information.

The unique aspect which most synergy efforts introduce is that this sharing is often pursued through novel organization schemes. These new approaches attempt to provide multi-dimensional focus on products, architectures, value streams, processes, and time horizons. The work inherent in this new focus often must be done in parallel (or at a lower priority) than the activities which implement the organization's continuing primary mission. Unrealistic expectations may be set to just 'do it all', without providing any additional resources for providing solutions which satisfy these added dimensions, or without the disciplines that would accompany normal project efforts. Both of these situations ignore the fact that the bigger and more complex the work is that an organization must do, the lower the overall productivity of the people who will be in pursuing it; as an example, consider this analysis of software estimating factors, which documents that as much as an order of magnitude reduction in productivity can occur on large projects over small ones.

The ability and time horizon to realize value from such synergy initiatives rests upon a number of important assumptions:

1. A catalog of reusable components, products and services exists that can satisfy the aggregated needs for a target market with only incremental investments. If this assumption is not true, you do not have a synergy project, but instead, have a large and complicated development program with many (and likely changing) dynamic constraints.
2. A requirements set exists which accurately characterizes this catalog; these requirements are coherent and have nearly complete overlap with end-user needs. Such requirements are necessary to provide a well-formed basis to evaluate gaps between the 'as-is' and the 'to-be' perspectives of stakeholders. As a result of this overlap (often traceable to a common heritage from which these items were designed), prior investments have produced results that are collectively useful and affordable (and thus can be expected continue to do so in the future).
3. These requirements enable decision-making on investments, design, integration, utilization, and support of solutions. Each of those decisions are essential to enables stakeholders to shape the fitness of existing and proposed solutions to satisfy end-user needs.
4. Components from this reuse catalog are compatible with a technical and business architecture. This architecture is essential because it is the glue that will enable components (both organizational and physical) to be made sufficiently robust to enable 'plug and play' engagements with the user community in delivering value to them over time. The less robust or homogenous this architecture is, or the more difficult it is for contributing organizations to 'plug in' their various parts, products, and services to deliver value to customers, the more variants that will have to be accommodated in operational configurations (typically through special, costly interface layers), or by implementing additional tooling, training, and translations, as 'value-harvesting' is attempted by developers and users of these components.
5. There are redundant or underutilized resources available while operating and evolving the system within the scope which the synergy effort is intended to exploit. While it may be possible to do more with less over time, it is only possible if there is people and money available to make these changes.
6. Stakeholders will agree to commit adequate investment funds to align their own resources, support development activities, evaluate candidate products, and align strategies to the new (interdependent) way of doing business.. This includes the leadership in all affected organizations and the customers of those organizations, who must 'buy in' to the benefits of the value propositions which the effort intends to pursue. You can't just roll out products - the community of customers have to be willing to invest in new ways of doing business.
7. Governance is sufficiently robust or can be developed to efficiently allocate resources and manage planning, development, distribution, and support so the goals of the synergy effort can be achieved. This governance will need to rapidly respond to changes in demand, must allocate limited resources to the most important work over time, and must ensure that investments will reliably return expected business results once an endeavor is selected and launched. Conditions are dynamic, and no one will be smart enough to allocate resources properly up front. So the means of distributing resources for operations and improvements must be eff
8. There must be an evaluation approach which facilitates the efficient and effective selection of the best approaches to satisfy stakeholder needs (both supplies of talent, suppliers of new components, and technology) from among available alternatives.
9. There are efficient and effective mechanisms in place to track benefits, evaluate tradeoffs, shape strategies, and accurately distribute their associated costs to the organizations ultimately responsible for these decisions, so the underlying business drivers of the synergy efforts can be managed and operated as a closed loop system. Such mechanisms enable stakeholders to meaningfully invest in capabilities beyond the existing features needed for local users, and manage varying rates of products and services, so each provider of parts, services, and architectures can continue to service the collective organization's and broader user community's needs over time, without unnecessarily burdened 'network' costs.

If these assumptions are not valid, it is possible for the appearance of synergy to occur ('Look, everyone's working together!'), while underlying inefficiencies continue to persist. Without these assumptions, extra efforts will be required (requirements elicitation, refactoring, etc) to utimately realize benefits from a synergy initiative, which will erode the value which can be realized, and may even tip the endeavor over from being useful to being harmful. This value erosion is not immediately apparent because synergy is usually just a abstract concept; as a result, while it may sound from the 'buzz' of an initiative that you are generating a lot of synergy, you may not actually be able to harvest the commensurate value you thought you could once the details are all accounted for, and all the required transformations are made.

This is why establishing a basis for measuring results is so critical for all commitments related to synergy initiatives, and why disciplined follow-up and accountability must accompany commitments to pursue all synergy endeavors. Since the assumptions upon which commitments are made may not be valid, the resulting activities should include special efforts towards validating the endeavor's assumptions, or mitigating them as risks, since these risks may severely limit the returns which can actually be harvested from the synergy initiatives themselves.

The below articles consider the above assumptions about synergy, explore the synergy value proposition (and the dynamics which it can exhibit over time) in more depth, discuss case studies and examples of pursuing synergy in practice, and make recommendations on approaches which can enhance the feasibility of achieving your target objectives from such 'common benefit' solutions.