Lost in the quicksand of visibility and access across Projects and Portfolios

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I’m hoping to tap into the collective wisdom here as we navigate the complexities of setting up scalable visibility and reporting on our Asana Advanced plan. We’re trying to find the right balance between keeping projects clean and providing the necessary cross-functional visibility for leadership and reporting.

Our Current Setup:

  • Teams: Our teams are structured by department (Creative, Production, Bus Dev, Program Management, Executive Leadership).

  • Privacy: To avoid overwhelming everyone, most of our teams and projects are set to Private to Members.

  • Portfolios: We have a fairly nested structure:

    • A main portfolio for our largest client, which contains several nested portfolios for that client’s sub-brands.

    • A portfolio for our Business Development projects.

    • A portfolio for all Internal projects.

    • A master “All-Company Initiatives” Portfolio, where we multi-home key projects from across the company specifically for high-level reporting.

We’re finding ourselves a bit lost in the quicksand of permissions, trying to figure out the most efficient way to grant access without just adding everyone to every project. This has led to a few key questions that I’d love your thoughts on.

Our Questions:

  1. Best Practices for Visibility: Is it really best practice to have a single person (like a Project Manager or an admin) added to every single project just to ensure visibility and connectivity? Or is there a more scalable, “best practice” way to share projects across an organization without resorting to making everything public?

  2. AI Reporting (Claude): For our “All-Company Initiatives” portfolio, we want to use AI tools like Claude for reporting. For the AI to pull a complete report, does the person running the query need to be a direct, individual member of every single project in that portfolio? Or is it sufficient if they are on a team that has Viewer access to those projects?

  3. Dashboard Permissions: When building a Universal Dashboard, what level of access is truly required? Do you need to have full Editor access at the individual or team level to build a meaningful dashboard, or is Viewer access enough to pull in the necessary data?

  4. Portfolio Reporting: Similarly, when generating a report from a portfolio, will the report be incomplete if the person generating it isn’t a member of every single project contained within that portfolio?

Any insights, workarounds, or best practices you’ve discovered would be incredibly helpful. Thanks in advance!

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@Kate_Goldsmith2,

Briefly:

  1. Teams are groups of people and they simplify granting access to most work objects by specifying membership/access and permissions by team rather than by person only
  2. You can test scenarios to answer some of your questions by working with a colleague or temporarily using two different member accounts and testing access/visibility.

It would take quite a while to answer all your questions, but maybe someone else will. I (and other Asana Partners) help clients/Asana customers daily with these kinds of things, and being able to work interactively and in depth for your situation can result in better outcomes than generic answers, should that be an option for your organization.

Thanks,

Larry

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Thank you for outlining your setup so clearly @Kate_Goldsmith2

Visibility Best Practice
It’s generally not recommended to add a single person to every project purely for oversight. Instead, use teams as permission groups and portfolios as the reporting layer. Creating a dedicated “Leadership” or “Reporting” team and sharing relevant projects with that team at Viewer level allows for cross-functional visibility without making everything public.

AI Reporting (Claude)
AI can only pull data the user can see. The user does not need Editor access or individual membership in every project, but they must have visibility either directly or through a team with access. If a project isn’t visible to them, it won’t be included in the report.

Dashboards
Viewer access is sufficient to build dashboards and pull reporting data. However, access to the underlying projects is required for the data to appear accurately.

Portfolio Reporting
Portfolios do not override project-level privacy. If someone generating a report cannot see all projects within a portfolio, their report will be incomplete.

In short, the most sustainable model is to scale visibility through intentional team-based sharing and standardized portfolio structures, rather than broad individual access.

Hopefully that helps. :slight_smile:

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