Posts Tagged: featured blogger

The Contract is Starting to Fail: Ideas for Righting the Course

It is always difficult when vendor performance on a contract starts going south. The signs are often small at first, a missed deadline, a work product that just isn’t quite what you were expecting, a meeting with stakeholders that does not work out as planned. Then the issues become bigger – multiple missed deadlines, incompleteRead… Read more »

Nutrient Sensor Challenge: Innovation by Another Name

Freshwater nutrient pollution alone costs the U.S. more than $2 billion each year. And that stat is an underestimate because it doesn’t account for brackish estuaries or the 95,000 miles of salty coasts. In an effort to help address this problem, EPA is part of the Challenging Nutrients Coalition, a group of federal agencies, universities,Read… Read more »

Gold Stars for In-House Innovators

Companies small and large talk often about the need to be more innovative, but progress without reflection misses a crucial component of cultural innovation. That is, how often do these companies reward top people and their projects? The EPA Innovation Team has several goals: support innovative bench science in the laboratories, demonstrate the power ofRead… Read more »

Soft Skills Learned Outside of the Office

It was October 2010, and I had a crazy morning at work.  I was out for a jog on the Trinity Trail during my lunch break when I saw two abandoned, skittish Basset Hounds that would forever change my life.  My original plan was to foster these two sweethearts, who we named Hank and Lucy.Read… Read more »