How do you build an org chart that stays up to date?

Why the chart is always wrong

The org chart on an intranet is almost always an image, a slide or a PDF. Somebody built it for an onboarding pack, it was accurate for about a fortnight, and updating it is nobody’s responsibility.

It then does active harm. A new starter uses it to work out who to ask, gets a name who left last year, and learns not to trust the intranet. That lesson generalises to every other page on it.

The directory already knows

Entra ID holds the answer and is maintained, because account provisioning depends on it. For each person it already has:

• Manager, which is the edge the chart is drawn from
• Job title and department
• Office location, and their photo
• Whether the account is still enabled, which is the part a drawn chart can never reflect

That last one matters most. A generated chart loses somebody the day their account is disabled. A drawn one keeps them until a human notices.

What has to be true for it to work

The manager field has to be populated. This is the real prerequisite and it’s usually where the project stalls. If HR maintains reporting lines in an HR platform and nobody syncs them to Entra, the directory has gaps — and a chart with gaps is worse than no chart, because the gaps look like fact.

Check before you build. Count the enabled accounts with no manager set. If it is more than a handful, fixing that is the project and the chart is the by-product.

Somebody has to own job titles. Entra titles drift, because nobody sees them. A generated chart makes them visible, which is a feature and also the first week’s worth of corrections.

Dotted lines won’t fit. Entra models one manager per person. Matrix reporting, secondments and acting arrangements don’t exist in the directory, so decide up front whether the chart is the formal structure or the working one. It can be the formal structure accurately, or the working structure approximately, and not both.

The sequence

1. Audit the manager field. Fix the gaps at source, in whatever system owns reporting lines
2. Agree who owns job titles and how a change gets made
3. Generate the chart from Entra, on the intranet page people already open
4. Delete the old image, so there’s no second answer

Step four sounds trivial and is the one that gets skipped. Two org charts is the same problem as none.

Where to start

The Org Chart Web Part draws a live chart from Entra ID on a SharePoint page. Ask for it on the page and we’ll send the package and the setup notes.

If the wider problem is that the intranet has several answers to most questions and no owner for any of them, the chart is a symptom. That’s the Intranet & Knowledge Layer.