What to do with Organizational Charts?

When trying to follow an international standard such as ISO 9001, questions may arise about the best practice for maintaining your company’s organizational charts. Most items (Quality Manuals, procedures, and work instructions) require a date and a revision number, but is this possible with an organizational chart? Wouldn’t personnel changes drive up the revision number faster than any other numbered item? Don’t fret, our resident expert answers your questions.

First, the ISO 9001 standard does not require organizational charts, but rather, that authorities be defined. The majority of companies use organizational charts simply as a way to define authorities, because they depict authorities in a clear manner. We therefore encourage our Clients to use organizational charts and add names and job titles so that it could be the one place where you will see who reports to whom. We also recommend for the organizational charts to be updated as often as necessary so they remain current.

For the past 15 years that we have been in business, we have not advised anyone to number their organizational charts the same way they number procedures or forms. We feel having a date inside the organizational chart, and posting the organizational charts on Web QMS (or whichever system your company is using) is a sufficient method to indicate the revision – especially since only authorized personnel have access to make changes. We believe you already have so much to keep up with and making this more complex will not add value. But if that is an issue with your Auditor, you can always amend your Document Control procedure and declare that “organizational charts will not have numbers or letter revisions, just a simple title and date”.

To answer the question we are asked by our Clients who use our Web QMS software, “How should I display my organizational chart?” We provide this suggestion:

As your organization gets larger, a simple list with simple titles may not be sufficient. The display of the organizational charts can be improved using these options:

1. Create your organizational chart in a table with additional columns showing the region, department, etc. (They can be sorted too.)
2. Move your organizational chart to an enhanced table, much like the Master Procedures, where you could even retain previous revisions.

If your company does not have a Quality Management System or would like to know more about our Web QMS software, call us at (713) 589-4680 or click here for more information.