How a global real estate firm’s finance team replaced status decks with Asana dashboards
INDUSTRY
Commercial real estate, global enterprise
SCOPE
Two corporate teams, with an architecture designed to scale to about 150 users
SERVICES
Hands-on Asana build, working sessions, and team training
HIGHLIGHTS
A finance template library with tutorials built into every project. Executive dashboards and portfolio reporting replacing manual deck-building. A goals structure connecting daily work to the company's 2030 strategy. The engagement extended into an ongoing monthly support partnership.
The client
Our client is one of the world's largest commercial real estate firms, a global enterprise with tens of thousands of employees.
Inside it, the corporate finance function carries an outsized share of strategic work: dozens of concurrent process improvement and technology projects, each with its own timeline, stakeholders, and rollout. The team was investing in a simple idea: work at that scale deserves an operating system, not a weekly assembly of decks and spreadsheets.
The challenge
The finance function had recently created a new leadership role specifically to look across its portfolio of projects, a view that had never existed before. The move came from a clear recognition: with more than 30 concurrent projects, coordination could no longer live in inboxes and individual drives.
Leadership went in clear-eyed about the starting point. Regular status reporting covered 6 of the finance team's 32 active projects, and producing it meant manual assembly. Project files sat in personal drives rather than one shared structure. And with no cross-portfolio view, sequencing collisions were hard to catch, including one stretch where three projects were set to roll out on the same day. Their own candid baseline: cross-team coordination scored a four out of ten, and project managers estimated 70 percent of their week went to meetings, much of it relaying status a system should be able to answer.
What they wanted was specific: track milestones and deliverables across every project, sequence rollouts so delivery lands when the business can absorb it, and give leadership a live view without anyone building it by hand.
The approach
Cirface embedded with the finance team through weekly working sessions, run live in the client's own Asana, with hands-on build hours between sessions. Every structure was designed alongside the client's project leads so the knowledge stays in-house.
The client set a smart rollout strategy from day one: project managers first, then project leads, then executives. Leadership deliberately waited until there was something worth logging into, so their first experience of the platform would be a working system rather than an empty one.
A template library that carries the process
The centrepiece for the finance team was a library of three project templates matched to how their work actually divides: process improvement projects, technology projects, and initiatives that combine both.
What is inside each template
Every template opens with the process already in place: standard sections for each phase of a project, pre-built tasks in the order the work happens, milestones marking the checkpoints leadership cares about, and custom fields carrying the data the team reports on. A finance-specific section holds the tasks and fields unique to their approval and delivery process, so every new project starts consistent instead of becoming consistent later. Because each template reports through the same fields, everything built from them rolls up cleanly into portfolio and dashboard views.
Refined with the people who run the work
The templates were not built in a corner and handed over. They went through successive working sessions with input from the project managers who would live in them, with edits gathered and applied round by round, and a final review with senior finance leadership before launch.
Tested on real work first
Before the templates went wide, the team migrated a live forecasting project into the new structure during a working session. Running real work through the template surfaced the final edits, so the version that shipped had already survived contact with an actual project.
Tutorials where the work happens
Short video walkthroughs are linked directly inside each template. A project manager opening their first project finds the explanation next to the task, not in a training folder they have to remember exists. An intake form now sits in front of the pipeline, so new initiatives arrive structured, with the information the team needs already captured.
An executive dashboard built on live work
Because every project shares the same fields and structure, the portfolio can finally be read in one place. The build gave finance leaders an executive dashboard, version one, designed to show what the platform can answer: projects by function, projects by phase, risks by status and by severity and probability, and budget views across the portfolio.
The dashboard reads straight from the work itself. When a project manager updates a task, the portfolio picture updates with it, so the answer to "where do things stand" is a place to look, always current, rather than a document someone had to stop working to produce.
The team then made a deliberately patient call: run the platform for a few months, watch which charts earn their place in real use, and refine or extend the dashboard from evidence rather than guesses. It is the same philosophy that shaped the templates: build the working version, test it against reality, then invest where reality says to.
Training built to cascade
Adoption was treated as a workstream, not an afterthought. A two-part Asana basics series took project managers from first login through tasks, projects, milestones, dependencies, and templates, followed by an advanced session for the power users. Recordings and sandbox test projects went to every attendee, and the tutorials embedded in the templates carry the same material into daily work. The structure gives the client a repeatable onboarding path for every future team that joins the platform.
Results
At the end of the initial engagement, the client signed on for an ongoing monthly support partnership to keep building on the foundation.
Status reporting that covered 6 of 32 finance projects now has an architecture built to cover all of them, with templates making reporting a by-product of the work instead of a weekly assembly job.
The reporting and dashboard layer targets the team's biggest cost: the estimated 70 percent of project managers' weeks spent in meetings explaining status a dashboard can now answer.
Give your leadership one place to look
Enterprise teams tell us the same thing: the work is happening, but proving it takes a deck every week. We build the system that answers instead.
