This article is co-authored by Nigel Forster, Regional Vice President ADM Sales at OpenText, and John Reuben, Managing Director at aangine.
Executives today face a paradox. Organizations have invested heavily in digital transformation (project systems, ERP, data lakes, agile dashboards) yet when change strikes, most still can’t answer a fundamental question: “What will this mean for everything else?” The gap between visibility and foresight has become one of the defining challenges of modern enterprise planning.
The limits of traditional planning
For decades, enterprise planning relied on two complementary but separate strengths: governance and execution. ERPs, PMOs, and PPM tools ensure discipline and accountability, but they were not designed to simulate the impact of change; they were only meant to record it.
As Columbia Business School’s Rita McGrath notes, “In an uncertain world, the ability to act and learn quickly is more valuable than the ability to predict perfectly.” Yet many enterprises still treat planning as an annual exercise rather than a continuous learning process. The result is what could be called planning theater: the appearance of control without the capacity to adjust when reality shifts.
Seeing the ripple effect
The new frontier is not more data, but deeper synthesis. When a portfolio leader accelerates one initiative, what downstream bottlenecks will emerge? If a budget shifts, how does that alter talent or capacity two quarters ahead? These are not accounting questions—they are foresight questions.
Planning technology is evolving from documentation to simulation. The next generation of platforms will model interdependencies across strategy, finance, and delivery, enabling leaders to explore scenarios, quantify trade-offs, and rehearse decisions before committing.
Oxford professor Bent Flyvbjerg, whose decades of research on project performance reshaped how organizations think about risk, writes that “projects go wrong not because people are irrational, but because they are human—and humans are terrible at foreseeing complexity.” The challenge is not prediction but preparation: giving decision-makers a structured way to test options safely before reality does it for them.
From visibility to foresight
That belief underpins the collaboration between OpenText and aangine. Together, the focus is on helping organizations move beyond static governance toward dynamic foresight. OpenText™ Project and Portfolio Management provides the enterprise-wide visibility and information governance that organizations depend on. aangine contributes a simulation layer that quantifies how change will affect portfolios, budgets, and outcomes.
The result is what many CIOs now describe as a safe place to plan—a continuously updated analytical environment where executives can explore multiple futures, not just document one. This is less about technology than about restoring confidence in decision-making.
Learning from experience
Across industries, this approach is already proving practical:
- A global bank now uses foresight modeling to test its annual plan, cutting cycle time by 30 percent while aligning 20 percent more initiatives with strategic goals.
- A telecommunications provider applies scenario analysis weekly to rebalance resources without overspend, achieving 60 percent improvement in on-time delivery.
- A public agency simulates multiple funding models to evaluate resilience before policy changes, enabling executives to protect critical outcomes amid uncertainty.
Each case demonstrates the same pattern: when planning becomes a living, data-driven system, agility moves from aspiration to measurable fact.
Culture before code
Technology alone cannot create foresight. The shift requires a cultural change—replacing certainty with curiosity and control with collaboration. As Peter Drucker warned, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” The same holds for planning. Without psychological safety to explore alternative futures, even the best analytics reinforce yesterday’s assumptions.
Looking ahead
The boundary between governance and foresight is dissolving. Future-ready enterprises will pair the structure of control with the freedom to model and learn. In that world, the question won’t be “What happened?” but “What might happen and how ready are we?”
At OpenText and Continuous Software, we share the conviction that planning is no longer about predicting a single future. It is about preparing for many—and having the analytical confidence to navigate whichever one unfolds.
About the authors
Nigel Forster is Regional Vice President of ADM Sales for OpenText, with more than 25 years of leadership in technology and software, spanning strategic alliances, sales enablement, and enterprise transformation. He has led global teams across the UK, France, and DACH, helping clients modernize software delivery and portfolio execution.
John Reuben is Managing Director at Continuous Software, the author of aangine, a foresight planning platform that enables enterprises to model the impact of change and continuously align strategy with execution. He has spent two decades helping organizations bridge the gap between planning and delivery through scenario-driven portfolio management.
