The root cause of the issue is that the "ccm status" command has changed in Rational Synergy 7.1.
This issue arises when the Synergy login does not match the Windows login id.
Prior releases printed the entire list of all sessions run from the current machine - regardless of the user logged into Windows
In other words,
if you were logged into Windows with user id = my.windowsid
and
if you were logged into Synergy with user id = my.synergyid
then,
ccm status would only return sessions in the output with respect to Synergy sessions launched by my.windowsid.
Example from log:

[workspace] $ ccm status
Sessions for user my.windowsid:

No sessions found.

Current project could not be identified.

[workspace] $ ccm start -d /database/ccmdb/syn7 -h synergyota -n my.synergyid -nogui -m -q -pw ********
ZSTS199D07:1201:172.17.44.46