Author: Steve Prendergast is the Director, Product Management at Anaplan.
In modern business, change is constant. Departments restructure, sales territories split, and product lines evolve. Yet for most planning teams, reflecting these changes in a traditional planning tool has historically been a slow, rigid, and highly manual process.
With our March 2026 release, those days are officially over. We are thrilled to introduce the new hierarchy chart with drag-and-drop capabilities — an interactive, highly visual experience that lets you reorganize your business structures in seconds, and gives builders a powerful new way to configure that experience for their teams.
Say goodbye to static org charts
Data is far more powerful when you can interact with it visually. Instead of scrolling through endless rows of employee spreadsheets or grid tables, the updated hierarchy chart displays your organization, sales territories, or product portfolios as a clean, interactive diagram.
Need to move an entire marketing department under a new regional vice president? Or reassign a product family to a different division? Simply select the node, drag it across the screen, and drop it onto its new parent. The hierarchy updates instantly, and every downstream calculation, roll-up, and budget allocation adjusts in real time.
Previously, changing a parent-child relationship meant navigating back to grids, updating parent list items manually, or running import actions. Now, planners can visually restructure their hierarchies in real time, right from the board or worksheet.
Model future scenarios without touching today's data
One of the most powerful aspects of this new capability is its support for alternative, data-driven structures. Because these charts can be tied to dynamic data lists, you don't have to disrupt your current production data to plan for tomorrow.
You can easily toggle between different dimensions like time, version, or scenario. This means you can:
- Model a proposed Q3 company restructure and compare it side-by-side with your active Q1 structure.
- Design "what-if" scenarios to see how moving resources affects team headcount limits and overall operational budgets.
- Set up effective-dated hierarchies to seamlessly plan transitions months in advance.
If you're managing this for your workforce specifically, the Operational Workforce Planning app builds this same interactive hierarchy experience directly into a ready-to-use application - connecting HR, finance, and talent acquisition around one live org structure, with built-in alerts for span-of-control or org-depth gaps and instant visibility into budget impact as you reorganize.
Keep your dashboards clean and organized
We know that large enterprise hierarchies can become overwhelming to look at. To make sure dashboards remain clear and easy to read, the new hierarchy chart features built-in smart pagination.
If a manager has 20 direct reports, the chart displays a clean summary of the first few nodes, with a simple "show next" button to expand and browse the rest. You get all the detail you need, without any of the clutter.
For builders: How to configure the hierarchy card
If you're a Model Builder or Page Designer, here's how to set up and deploy this interactive experience.
1. Choosing the right data structure
When configuring a hierarchy card, you can choose between two distinct data structures in the card configuration panel:
- List hierarchy: The classic, default setting. It builds the chart directly from the hard-coded list hierarchy of your model. Great for static structures, but moving nodes in this mode will permanently modify the model's primary hierarchy.
- Data list: This is where the magic happens. By using a flat list and specifying a "parent" line item, you can build dynamic, data-driven charts. This lets you maintain multiple, alternative hierarchies across different versions, scenarios, or time period, making it the ideal choice for "what-if" workforce or territory planning.
Builder tip: We highly recommend using the data list structure if you plan to enable interactive editing, node creation, or node deletion. It offers significantly better performance and natively supports scenario planning.
2. Setting up interactive drag-and-drop
Once your hierarchy card is placed on your board, open the card designer and navigate to the hierarchy tab to activate interactive planning:
- Go to list edit settings.
- Toggle allow editing to the right. This empowers end-users to drag and drop nodes or use the context menus to change parents on the fly.
- If you want users to be able to expand their teams or add items, turn on enable node create. You will need to link this to a form action so users can populate mandatory fields when adding a new node.
- Turn on allow deletion if users need to prune branches. You can choose in-built model deletion (which purges the item from the model list) or boolean deletion (for a soft-delete/deactivation status).
3. Configuring secondary edit line items for read-only parents
A common builder challenge occurs when the parent line item is formula-driven (such as logic pulling historical records or effective-dated parents). Because formula-driven line items are read-only, users cannot edit the hierarchy directly.
To solve this, Anaplan includes a secondary edit line item field. Select a writable line item in this field to act as an "override." This lets you keep your complex, formula-driven parent logic intact while still giving users the flexibility to manually drag, drop, and override relationships when planning future states.
4. Keeping charts clean with pagination
For wide hierarchies (like a manager with dozens of direct reports), hierarchy charts can quickly become crowded.
In the card settings, toggle allow pagination on. This limits the initial view to three nodes per level and displays a "show next 5 nodes" button — keeping your board looking polished while giving users the power to browse deep structures at their own pace.
Ready to make visual planning effortless?
Whether you're mapping out workforce planning, realigning sales territories, or organizing a complex supply chain, the drag-and-drop hierarchy chart puts the steering wheel directly in your hands.
If you're a business user, ask your page builder to add a hierarchy card to your boards, and discover how effortless visual planning can truly be!
Questions? Leave a comment!
