A structure chart from an indented list ORGCHART

The list is the real artefact, not the picture

Nobody keeps an organisation chart in a drawing package. They keep it in their head, or in a list somewhere, and they draw it once a year under duress in a tool that then owns it, at which point updating it means opening that tool, finding the file, and being the one person who knows how it works.

The list is what survives. It is editable in any text box, it can be pasted into an email, it shows up sensibly in a diff so you can see what changed between March and June, and it is the thing somebody will actually update when a person joins.

So the input here is an indented list and the picture is derived from it. Edit a line and the chart moves. There is nothing to maintain except the list, and if this page disappeared tomorrow you would still have everything that mattered.

Why the layout is worth doing properly

The chart uses the tidy-tree method: children are placed under their parent, subtrees are pushed apart only as far as they need to be, and the parent is centred over its children afterwards.

The naive alternative gives every leaf a fixed slot and puts each parent above the middle of its span. It is much simpler and it produces the charts everybody recognises as bad: a department with nine people sprawls across the page while the one next to it with two sits in a narrow column, so the picture's shape reflects team size rather than structure, and a manager ends up drawn nowhere near the people reporting to them. Tidy layout costs more code and makes a chart you can read across a room.

Writing the list

One person or role per line, indented under whoever they report to. Consistent indentation: pick tabs or a number of spaces and keep to it, because the indentation is the structure and a line indented by three spaces among lines indented by four is a line in the wrong place.

Put the role on the line as well as the name, because that is what makes the chart useful to somebody who does not already know everyone. And decide deliberately what to do with dotted lines and matrix reporting: a tree has one parent per node, so a second reporting line either goes in the text of the node or does not go in at all. Trying to draw it usually produces a chart nobody can read.

A chart is also a disclosure. An organisation chart with full names tells an outsider who reports to whom, which is the raw material for a convincing impersonation email: the single most effective thing in a phishing attempt is knowing that the request would plausibly come from that person. Use roles rather than names for anything published outside, and check with SCRUB before a document with one in it goes out.

Nothing you type is uploaded. Nearby: OUTLINE is the same indented structure for a document, SEATING arranges people in a room, and HANDOVER is what the structure is for on the day.