Organizing Work for Large Department

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I’m building out a “Campaign Creator” engine for our department, and would love input on how others are organizing their work across teams/full department, and how they work to retroactively clean up Asana to streamline and simplify the work being done, with fewer disruptions.

We are a LARGE department - 90+ people in 15 teams - and tend to work in silos. Asana has really helped us to bridge those gaps in communication, and we’re still learning new ways to work in the platform.

In 2025 we kicked off a new way of organizing this work - BRIEF tasks for all large initiatives are multi-homed in one overarching project. We sort this project by Quarter and Service Line/client to see all connections of the moving pieces between teams, and have automated multi-homing again back into Campaign projects for a view of all of this work combined.

With so much flexibility in the platform, how are others organizing their work? What automations have you found helpful in bucketing/sorting through the piles?

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Love what you’ve set up so far. Multi-homing brief tasks into an umbrella project by Quarter and Service Line is exactly how I’ve seen large teams break silos.

A few patterns I’ve seen work well for 90+ person orgs:

  1. Portfolio as your “department control room.” One Portfolio per Service Line or client with the key projects inside. Add the same custom fields you use in projects so reporting rolls up cleanly. Use Portfolio Dashboards to track status, blockers, and SLA breaches.

  2. Standardize custom fields. Pick one source of truth for fields like Service Line, Quarter, Stage, Effort. Lock options, hide duplicates, and archive old fields so reporting doesn’t fragment.

  3. Templates for campaigns. Prebuild a Campaign project template with sections, fields, milestones, and rules. When someone spins up a campaign, they get the same scaffolding every time.

  4. Intake with routing. Use a single intake project with a Form. Route submissions via rules based on Service Line or priority. Rules can auto assign, set due dates, add to the right campaign project, and drop into the correct section.

  5. Rules that reduce handoffs. Examples I use:

  6. When Stage changes, move section, update assignee, and add followers.

  7. When Service Line is set, auto add to the Service Line project and the Portfolio’s key project.

  8. When a task becomes a Milestone, auto create dependency tasks or approvals.

  9. If priority is High, set due date offset and @mention a triage lead.

  10. Capacity and Workload. Add an Effort field (hours or points) and use Portfolio Workload to spot overloads across teams. This helps you rebalance before things slip.

  11. Dependencies + milestones for cross team work. Gate team B’s work behind team A’s deliverable. Surface “waiting on” in Portfolio reporting to clear blockers faster.

  12. Light governance. A monthly 30 minute hygiene pass works wonders:

  13. Bulk close or archive stale projects.

  14. Normalize field values via bulk edit.

  15. Review rules that generated noise and tune triggers.

  16. Post a quick “what changed” note so everyone stays in sync.

Quick questions to tailor this:

  1. Do you have a single intake or are teams still creating work ad hoc?

  2. Are your custom fields shared org wide or duplicated per team?

  3. Any specific pain point you want automation to solve first, like assignment, dates, or cross project visibility?