How to Structure for Holding Company with Sub-Companies

I’m trying to determine the most efficient and cost effective way to set up Asana to use with a holding company that owns multiple brands. Please bear with me as I do my best to lay this out!

Holding Company owns multiple brands and has a departmental structure that provides support to each of its Brands (e.g., an IT department, a construction department, a legal department, etc.).
Brands under Holding Company operate independently from one another.

Holding Company would like to begin using Asana to manage its projects. Holding Company also would like each Brand to use Asana to manage their own projects, as Holding Company wants to gain better visibility into each Brand’s project progress.

A few things I’m considering as I figure out the best way to structure things:

  • Holding Company and its owned Brands all have different email domains.

  • Billing for Asana services does not need to be separated by Brand, as Holding Company is paying the bill.

  • Each Brand has projects that would include team members from Holding Company (e.g. any project that has an IT component).

  • Holding Company’s leadership team would like to use the Portfolio feature to track progress at a high level; outside of that, it’s not expected they would have much engagement with the platform.

I’ve gone down the rabbit hole looking at things like organizations, workspaces, teams and divisions, and have really confused myself. It’s important that this is set up in a way that Holding Company can see all projects, and my understanding is that if the brands are set up in different organizations/workspaces, I won’t be able to create a portfolio that includes all projects for Holding Company’s LT team to review.

Am I overthinking this? Should I just set up an organization within Asana for Holding Company, and then create a teams as needed for Holding Company and Brands? If I go this route, the initial drawback I see is that users for Brand have different email domains, and would need to be added to the team as Guests/Limited Access Users.

Help! This one is throwing me for a loop.

Just one thought. If you’re planning to use Asana to store critical business data that would cause serious problems if it is corrupted or deleted, then I would think very carefully, as Asana does NOT have the data management or data security features that we have come to expect in most data storage systems. Users can change or delete tasks and files, with minimal traceability. Users can even delete the audit trail with zero visibility.

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Did you ever find a solution to this? I have a similar setup I’m trying to solve.