“I came into contract administration by accident,” explains Hill Federal Contract Administrator Christine Prettyman. “I’d been working in accounts receivable for a while and wanted a new challenge. I took a position with a small, woman-owned business in Washington, DC, that provided conferencing and technical support to U.S. Federal clients and here I am 35 years later.”

Christine joined Hill as part of the U.S. Federal Team this past Spring, responsible for helping fulfill Hill’s many reporting requirements under our U.S. Federal contracts, tracking our small business partners’ participation percentages, and managing the reams of data and documentation related to our U.S. Federal work, including CPARS evaluations, SAM.gov registrations, and many others. Given the breadth and depth of Hill’s work for the U.S. Federal Government—which currently encompasses assignments for the Department of Energy (DOE), the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), the General Services Administration (GSA), the Department of State (DOS), the Federal Transit Administration (FTA)—and Christine has plenty to do.

“I may be part of the Federal Team but I’m available to support anyone involved in a U.S. Federal Government contract anywhere in the company,” she emphasizes. “I want to be a value add for our PMs. What can I do to help you meet the requirements of your specific contract? At a minimum, I can take a look at the contract and smooth out the process. At the other extreme, I can help everybody stay on the right side of compliance and avoid any penalties—and keep everyone out of jail, including myself.”

Christine’s ultimate goals for Hill go beyond tracking and compliance. “I’m working on establishing a true contract library for the company,” she explains. “A single repository with all our U.S. Federal contracts, task orders, blanket purchase agreements (BPAs), and IDIQs that we can use for analysis, reporting, and more.

“Having this database will make everybody’s lives a little easier, help leverage our work for business development, and make our clients happy as well as they’ll know we understand what they’re looking for and can quickly deliver when it comes to documentation.”

Christine is bringing the lessons learned and best practices of her career to create this repository and to support our teams. This includes administrating contracts for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), GSA, DOE, DOT, the U.S. Air Force, and the Department of Health and Human Services. Through this work, she knows the triggers that may raise an issue with an owner, the contracting objectives and constraints of many of the agencies we work with, and how to keep vital information from getting lost in the shuffle.

Developing her contracting chops was not without its hurdles, she notes. “Without a doubt the most challenging contracts of my career were for the EPA,” she says. “Remedial Action Contracts involved multiple tiers of complexity, with every region having its own preferences and its own personalities. I worked on those for 7 years and about 80 task orders. I remember at one Industry Day I actually got a hug from the head of EPA contracts, which says a lot, no other contractor received such attention.”

Specifics of Christine’s expertise include experience with all federal contract types, pre- and post-contract administration, negotiation, management of COTS service, contractual closeout documentation, standardization of contractual procedures, and development of processes which can be duplicated for efficiency. She also has been part of a team implementing Contract Management Lifecycle database systems.

“I see a lot working well at Hill, and a few areas for improvement,” she says of her introduction to the company’s contracting systems and processes. “There is a lot of information in a lot of different places. Our separate databases—Vision and Vantagepoint—can make some tasks a little complicated. But I see a lot of progress on all fronts, and I hope I can help get us to the next level. We’re getting there.”

Currently, Christine is helping multiple regions negotiate and finalize new wins with our U.S. Federal clients while continuing her ongoing information and knowledge management tasks. As for the support she needs, she says simply, “If I ask, I need. The stakes are high in federal contracting, which can be scary, but it’s also exciting.”