Page 40 of Take It Offline

“Fine, don’t believe me.” I drop my pen to the table and run a hand over my face. “Anyway, forget Roberts. Tell me how you wanna save this, and we’ll go from there.”

The first wave of the plan—and, of course, she’s already thought ahead for waves two and three—is to strip everything back. Document management 101.

“Off the top of your head,” she says, standing.

I’m almost 100 percent sure if I make a teacher joke, she’ll tear one of my limbs off, but I can’t help it when she looks so damn good like this. Passionate. Competent.

“What is the difference,” she continues, “between the Document Control Standard and the Document Governance Standard?”

It’s a trick question. There isn’t one, at least not one that can be worked out between its pages of overwritten, self-aggrandizing nonsense. “Showmanship?”

“See?” she asks, exasperated. “If the best document controller in the business can’t tell the difference, what hope does a layman have?”

Well, fuck. I’m grinning wide now, and if I had a damn tail, it’d be wagging.

Emma continues. “I’m not saying do away with the details, but there are too many here. And too many rules.” Nowthat’sa phrase I never thought I’d hear from her. “It’s forty-five pages long when it could be ten. It serves as the foundation, so it needs to be an overarching, easy-to-read document that outlines why we do what we do. The how comes later. Then every document underneath should start with identifying who it’s aimed at. One for internal users, one for external, and an instruction for DCs.”

Fuck, she’s smart. And damn if I don’t find myself getting swept up in her. Roberts is dead wrong. There is a leader in her. A damn good one, who cuts through the bullshit and—despite what I’ve thought in the past—genuinely cares about the people impacted by her work. She might come across as unmoving, but in reality, she’s a force to be reckoned with.

There’s a badass under all that politeness, and she’s electrifying.

“What about you?” she asks, and goddamn, the full force of her attention is like a shot of adrenaline. Even more surprising, she seems to really want to know my opinion. “What would you change?”

“The way I see it, we can’t change the regulation stuff, so we should focus on the areas we can. But too much change is going to make people panic. If we start with changing the shit that already annoys people, it’ll be easier to convince them to adopt it.”

She smiles. “Go on.”

My heart does a weird little flip. Goddamn, why does it feel like I just impressed the teacher? Fuck.Get it together, man.

“Fewer rules might not be the answer. Our processes aren’t really the issue. They’re just confusing as hell to follow, so people find the path of least resistance.”

“You’re right.”

I think it takes a full minute to process what I just heard.

Leaning into her space, I grin. “Wait, say that again. I wasn’t recording.”

And holy fuck, she laughs, real and loud, before dropping back into her chair with a looseness that’s got to be the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen.

“Well, as you’ve reiterated to me many times, vendors either don’t want to follow our procedures, or the project scope is too small to warrant rigorous compliance.”

Never have I ever been turned on by a thesaurus until now.

“And honestly, I can understand it. I’ve been wanting to untangle the mess around uncontrolled documents since the day I started here. It’s ridiculous the amount of energy we spend on supporting information that only needs to be kept internal or confidential but not referenced for operations.”

“Do that, and they may throw you a parade,” I say. “But we need to be careful. If we make it a free-for-all, it’ll be carnage, and site will have the bad kind of field day.” I sit back and press my hands against the armrests of my chair. “The last thing we need is to piss off the guys on the ground. They complain, and it’s straight to the boss’s ears.”

She sags back in her chair, her hands falling away from her laptop with a sigh. “Back to the drawing board, then.”

And just like that, I know things have changed.

A month ago, there was no way Emma would have admitted I was right or listened long enough to let me change her mind about anything.

It shouldn’t be as hot as it is. I’ve sat in day-long meetings with red-faced guys with bald spots discussing comment processes and turnarounds, and this is the first time I’ve ever gotten hot under the collar.

“If we can make compliance invisible,” she says, her eyes brimming with an intense focus. “Build it in so it’s automatically there as people create content. They’d have to go out of their way to go against it. The harder the system works for us, the better the experience for the people using it.”

Fuck. She issomuch better suited to this than I am. Roberts shouldn’t have even asked me to do this. I work my ass off, and I know everything there is to know about how it works, but I don’t have these kinds of ideas. And here Emma is with a multi-step plan. Talking about keeping things system agnostic so we don’t have to rewrite the rules every time we so much as think of changing a button.

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