Agile Planning in Volatile Markets: Maximizing Value from Existing Resources

By Monica Monforte Barnau 4 min read • Published October 15, 2025

“The oil and gas industry just needs to run fast just to stand still.” That observation from Raj Sen, Senior Director of Business Development for Corporate Planning at Quorum Software, set the tone for the recent webinar, Agile Planning in Volatile Markets: Maximizing Value from Existing Resources.

Joined by Aaron Johnson, Corporate Planning Specialist at Quorum Software, and Pascale Neff, Advisor of Economics and Planning at OMV, Raj framed the challenge facing every upstream company: balancing supply decline, rising demand, and unpredictable price swings. The session explored how planners can move from reactive cost-cutting to proactive portfolio management, and how OMV has built agility into its planning processes.

Pascale shared how OMV now stress-tests every project across multiple scenarios, requires all projects to be structured incrementally, and can rerun company-wide plans in a single day. Aaron then demonstrated how Planning Space enables breakeven analysis, sensitivity testing, and portfolio optimization, giving planners more options and greater resilience in volatile markets. Watch the full webinar here.

Why Agility Matters Now

Energy demand remains strong as populations grow, a larger middle class requires more energy, energy poverty must be addressed, and AI infrastructure expands power needs. On the supply side, most upstream spend now goes to offset natural decline rather than add new barrels. The global average post-peak decline rates are about 5.6 % for conventional oil and 6.8 % for conventional gas, and if capital investment were to cease, oil output could fall 8 % per year (around 5.5 million barrels per day) and natural gas 9 % (≈270 billion cubic meters). Exploration’s share is smaller, discoveries are lower, and price volatility remains a constant. The takeaway is clear: planning cycles that once relied on a single annual outlook are no longer enough. Companies like OMV now run quarterly performance reviews and immediate scenario reruns to keep plans current against shifting market conditions.

From Reactive to Proactive

Cost cutting alone does not create resilience. Agile planning comes from building options you can pull forward, defer, or resize as conditions change. That means designing scenarios before you need them and presenting clear trade-offs so leadership can decide with confidence. As Raj puts it, “One of the prerequisites for agility is to have options.”

OMV has built this mindset directly into its workflows, requiring all projects to be structured incrementally so they can be rescheduled or resized with less disruption. When prices recently dropped by about 10%, this approach gave OMV the flexibility to protect value and keep its portfolio resilient under stress scenarios.

A Practitioner Playbook

Granular decision units, incremental economics, and sensitivity analysis help planners focus on what moves the needle most. In practice, this means moving beyond one-off models to systems that can rerun full portfolios in hours, not weeks. As Pascale noted, stress testing projects under multiple price and currency assumptions ensures that OMV maintains confidence in its portfolio, even in downside cases. By identifying break-even points and pressure testing sensitivities, their planners know exactly when projects remain resilient and when intervention is needed.

Customer Perspective: OMV’s “Plan To Value”

OMV’s approach illustrates the shift from reactive planning to proactive portfolio management. Using Planning Space, the company integrates economics across ventures, applies P10, P50, P90, and failure cases to capture uncertainty, and evaluates every project against multiple price decks.

This process has replaced weeks of spreadsheet-based effort with a system that can generate updated company-wide results in a single day, enabling leadership to react to change without overreacting.

“In a matter of a day, you can have an entire company rerun and have your new results to deliver.” -Pascale Neff, Advisor of Economics & Planning, OMV

Driving Agility Together

The challenges of supply decline, demand growth, and market volatility aren’t going away — but companies can prepare by building flexibility into their plans. As this webinar showed, agile planning isn’t just about cutting costs. It’s about structuring projects incrementally, stress testing portfolios, and giving decision-makers more options to capture value in any scenario.

Ready to see how Planning Space can support your planning process?

Book a demo or request a proof of concept today.