Portfolios in Asana to Manage Campaigns, Deliverables, and other Responsibilities

Digital Project Management

Stephen Babb Director, Project Management| Drexel University Philadelphia, United States

I direct a project management office that supports a high-volume creative agency. We solved the challenge of losing the forest for the trees with all the campaigns, deliverables, and other responsibilities. Our work management system is Asana.

Challenges: We missed the big picture

• Project managers and contributors couldn’t keep track of the many projects they’re working on

• Executives couldn’t get a simple answer of “how’s that one campaign coming along?”

• Creatives and other contributors got caught in the weeds by navigating task-by-task

Solution: Portfolios for each project manager and contributor

• The PMO manages custom portfolios for each project manager and other contributors to aggregate relevant projects with important details of each

• Project managers post recurring project status updates with a concise, high-level summary and next steps of the respective project

• Anyone can link these project status updates to executives and other stakeholders who want to know the latest on the project

Do any other creative agency PMOs leverage portfolios in Asana, or something similar in another work management system? I would love to hear how you manage the information for the various functional teams, project-based teams, and management levels.

Posted: Feb 7, 2026 11:14 PM

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Luis Branco CEO| Business Insight, Consultores de Gestão, Ldª Carcavelos, Lisboa, Portugal

Strong use case, and a very common pain point in creative PMOs.

What stands out most is the deliberate move from task navigation to portfolio-level sensemaking. That is usually the real inflection point. When executives ask “how is this campaign going”, they are not asking for task completion. They are asking for signal, risk exposure, trajectory, and decision readiness.

From experience leading and supporting PMOs in high-volume environments, portfolios only create lasting value when they are designed as a governance layer, not merely as an aggregation view. That means being explicit about what the portfolio exists to answer, and just as important, what it deliberately does not surface.

Clear design choices make the difference:

A small set of health indicators tied to outcomes, not activity
Explicit decision flags and escalation criteria
Visibility of dependencies and systemic risks
Lightweight articulation of value impact, not just delivery status

Without this, portfolios tend to devolve into another busy dashboard.

The recurring high-level status updates you describe are a critical complement to that design.
Concise narrative consistently outperforms raw metrics, especially in creative contexts where ambiguity, iteration, and discovery are inherent to the work.
Narrative provides meaning, metrics provide evidence.
You need both, but in the right order.

We have observed similar patterns across different platforms, not only Asana.
The underlying principle is platform-agnostic: different altitude views for contributors, project leaders, and executives, without forcing everyone into the same level of abstraction or detail.

On the question of sustainability under pressure, which is often the hardest part: portfolio reviews only avoid collapsing back into task-level discussions when the governance rules are explicit and enforced by design, not facilitation alone.
Clear review agendas, time-boxed escalation discussions, and a shared agreement that tasks are managed elsewhere are essential. When pressure rises, people default to detail unless the system actively prevents it.

Curious to hear how you have formalised those rules.
What design or governance mechanisms do you rely on to keep portfolio conversations focused on decisions and outcomes rather than activity?

Posted: Feb 8, 2026 11:27 AM

Md. Golam Rob Talukdar

Community Champion

Project Manager| AWR Development (BD) Ltd. Cox's Bazer , Bangladesh

Thanks for sharing this, Stephen.
We’ve seen similar benefits using portfolio-level views—having a clear, high-level snapshot really helps leaders stay out of the weeds while giving teams clarity on priorities. Curious to hear how others balance portfolio visibility with day-to-day execution in their tools.

Posted: Feb 9, 2026 7:57 AM

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Portfolios in Asana to Manage Campaigns, Deliverables, and other Responsibilities

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