Kennisbank

Tracking synergies with a traffic light system: what needs to sit behind it

A traffic light is a summary, not an analysis. Green, amber or red says something about the status of a synergy at the moment someone looks at it, but it says nothing about why that status is what it is, who can do something about it, and what needs to happen before the colour changes. Anyone who sets up a synergy tracker with only colours has built a reporting tool without a steering tool behind it. That works until the first synergy stalls, and then it turns out nobody can say exactly what is stalling.

A traffic light without an assumption is a guess

Every synergy rests on an assumption: a price increase that gets accepted, a supplier who gives a lower rate for combined volume, a team that can be merged without revenue dropping. That assumption determines whether the synergy is realistic, and that assumption is also the first thing you need to check when the status changes. A synergy that goes from green to amber is not interesting because the colour changes. It is interesting because something has happened to the assumption behind it — the supplier is negotiating harder than expected, the customer is responding differently than expected, the team turns out to be smaller than the headcount list suggested. Without capturing that assumption alongside the traffic light, you are only registering that there is a problem, not what the problem is. How you formulate and record the assumption behind a synergy figure determines whether the traffic light can still be interpreted later on.

A traffic light without an owner is decoration

The second question for every traffic light is who looks at it and who can act on it. A synergy that is red and for which nobody is responsible stays red until someone happens to have the time and the mandate to look at it. That is usually too late, or it does not happen at all. The owner of a synergy is not automatically the person who proposed the synergy in the business plan, nor automatically the CFO because it involves money. The owner is the person who can assess the assumption, can influence progress, and is accountable if the synergy does not land. Who that owner should be differs per synergy and per organisation, but the question should be asked for every line in the tracker, not afterwards when something goes wrong.

What a traffic light measures, not just what it shows

A third point that is often missing: what is the colour based on. Green can mean that the plan is on schedule, or it can mean that nobody has recently checked whether the plan still holds. Those two are not the same, and a tracker that does not capture that difference creates false certainty. Tracking with traffic lights only works if there is a fixed measurement point underneath every synergy: a concrete figure, a milestone, a contract date, something that can be checked objectively, independent of the owner's judgement. Otherwise the traffic light becomes a mood rather than a measurement.

This should be paired with a review moment that does not depend on chance. Some synergies are time-bound — they need to land before a particular contract expiry date or a particular reorganisation round — while others are ongoing. How and when you check whether a synergy is still achievable determines whether the traffic light changes on time or only after the chance to adjust course has already passed.

The question that remains with every traffic light

A tracker with traffic lights invites you to steer towards landing: how do we get this synergy from amber to green. That is not always the right question. Sometimes the answer is that the synergy should never have existed, because the underlying case was already weak at the start, or because the integration activity needed to realise it costs more — in time, attention, culture — than the synergy delivers. A red traffic light is not automatically a problem that needs to be solved by pushing harder. It can also be a signal that the synergy should be scrapped, or that the two organisations are better off continuing to operate separately on this point. How you build the case for a synergy before it enters the tracker determines how much room there is to ask that question later without losing face.

The timing of all this is linked to what has already been arranged on Day 1. Some traffic lights can only turn green once certain contracts or systems have been transferred, and what needs to be arranged already on Day 1 determines which synergies can be tracked from day one and which only come into view later.

From traffic light to work

Every traffic light that is amber or red ultimately represents work: an analysis that needs to be redone, a contract that needs to be revised, a team that needs to set up a new process. Before that work is assigned, it is useful to know how much of that work a system can take over and how much remains human work. FTE TO AI's work scan calculates per task which part of the work can be taken over by AI, giving an indication of where capacity is freed up to pick up exactly that kind of synergy work without the rest of the organisation grinding to a halt.