The Org Tree

GreenVee maintains two separate but complementary hierarchies for people. Understanding which is which helps you read org views and resource reports correctly.

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The department tree

The department tree is your formal organisational chart. It is built from Department records, each of which can have a parent department.

Company
  ├── Engineering
  │     ├── Electrical Design
  │     └── Civil & Structural
  └── Operations
        ├── Field Services
        └── Health & Safety

Each node is a Department. Each Department has:

• A leader — the Employee responsible for that unit.
• A parent — the Department one level above (empty for the root).
• Children — any Departments directly beneath it.

The department tree represents your formal structure — how the company is divided into business units, regardless of who currently works in each unit or who manages whom day-to-day.

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The supervisor tree

The supervisor tree is built from the supervisor field on Employee records. Every employee can point to one other employee as their supervisor, creating a reporting-line hierarchy.

CEO
  └── Head of Engineering
        ├── Senior Engineer A
        │     └── Graduate Engineer X
        └── Senior Engineer B

This tree answers the question “who reports to whom?” It is independent of departments — an employee’s supervisor may be in a different department, or the same department but a different sub-team.

The supervisor tree is used in:

• Approval workflows (routing sign-offs up the chain)
• Reporting views that group by management line
• Org-flow visualisations in the product

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Skill Categories — a third hierarchy

Skill Categories are also hierarchical. They form a tree of capability groups rather than an org structure, but the same recursive pattern applies: a category can have child categories, which can have further children.

The Structure view (/structure) blends employees, project members, and skills into a single flow diagram — showing not just who is where, but what each part of the organisation can do, and where project roles are filled or still open. See Skills for how required and actual skills are matched inside this view.

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Which tree to use for what

Question	Use this tree
How is the company formally divided?	Department tree
Who approves this employee’s requests?	Supervisor tree
Which business unit bears the cost?	Department tree
Who is the skip-level manager?	Supervisor tree
What capabilities does this division have?	Skill Category tree (overlaid on department)

For Team Leads

The org tree feeds reporting and resource matrices. Keeping both the department leader fields and supervisor fields accurate ensures that capacity reports, utilisation summaries, and approval chains reflect your real organisation. A mismatch between the two trees — for example, an employee whose supervisor sits outside their department hierarchy — is sometimes intentional in matrix organisations, but worth reviewing periodically.

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Related pages

• Employees & Departments — where both trees are built from
• Skills — the Skill Category hierarchy
• Project Members vs Employees — how employees appear inside projects