You know the scenario well. Your agency needs to automate a critical process. You navigate the procurement labyrinth, select a vendor, and after months of work, the new system is finally live. Your team celebrates. But then a policy changes, or new leadership introduces a different vision. What should be a quick system tweak becomes another months-long procurement journey, holding back critical changes with tangible impact.
This is one of the central challenges facing state and local leaders today: the way agencies buy technology services doesn’t match how modern digital platforms work. The pace of change requires a different service model.
For years, government agencies have procured solutions with fixed scope and specifications, typically using a waterfall approach. It works perfectly for tangible goods like a new office building, but it’s a poor fit for dynamic platforms like Salesforce. These platforms are designed to evolve and adapt, yet your procurement processes treat every change as a new, high-friction project.
This disconnect creates three major problems for agencies:
- Capacity Mismatch: You’re often forced to buy a fixed amount of capacity upfront, paying for 100% of what you might need in the future, while only using 10-20% in the first year.
- Operational Friction: Simple improvements—like a new report or process automation—are treated as exceptions, requiring new, lengthy approvals that kill momentum and frustrate staff.
- Loss of Agility: When constituents’ needs change or a new program launches, your technology becomes a bottleneck instead of an enabler. You’re left managing a static system rather than using it for your mission.
A Better Way: Consumption-Based Salesforce Services
What if you could treat your Salesforce platform as a flexible resource that grows with your mission?
Instead of buying a fixed project or paying for unused capacity, you can adopt a flexible hourly model—similar to how you would retain legal counsel or specialized consulting. With this approach, you contract for maintenance and improvement hours that scale to your needs.
This is the core concept behind Waves, an approach designed for the dynamic needs and demands of government. It offers three advantages:
- Pay for what you use. You’re not buying a fixed scope of work. You get a set of flexible, monthly hours for both maintenance and new implementations. This allows you to start small and scale your investment thoughtfully as your needs grow.
- Adapt at the speed of policy. Changes are handled through internal requests, not new procurement cycles. This allows your team to automate new workflows, adjust for policy changes, or build a new dashboard in weeks, not months.
- Access dedicated expertise. You work with a consistent team that knows your agency’s unique data, processes, and mission. There’s no learning curve, and your team gets the support they need to be effective.
The result is a service model that fits how your agency actually works, helping you prioritize without losing sight of the mission. Your staff becomes more productive, your agency becomes more responsive, and your technology becomes the asset it should be.
The Real-World Test: An Economic Development Use Case
Let’s consider a state’s economic development agency to see the value of this approach in action. Their Salesforce instance was built to manage a single, flagship business grant program.
Over the past year, three major changes hit at once:
- A federal funding shift was announced for a key grant program, requiring a new application process and separate reporting.
- An executive order on equity was issued, requiring the agency to track and report on grants awarded to minority- and women-owned businesses.
- A new director started and wanted a real-time dashboard to track application backlogs and payment processing.
Under a traditional fixed-scope contract, each of these would be a new project, stuck in a procurement queue for months while agency staff struggled with spreadsheets and manual reporting.
With Waves, the agency now has an adaptable contract for a quarterly pool of implementation hours. This lets the agency respond to changes quickly:
- Quarter 1: The team can immediately use their hours to create a new application and workflow to meet new grants, ensuring the federal funds are deployed on time and in compliance with federal requirements.
- Quarter 2: They can use the next quarterly pool to add new custom fields and build the required equity dashboards to meet the executive order.
- Quarter 3: The new director can use a small portion of the hours to build a custom dashboard showing real-time application status, providing immediate visibility and improving decision-making for both their team and their leadership
Your Call to Action: See Where You Stand
If you find yourself or your team saying any of the following, it’s a clear signal that your current delivery model is a bottleneck:
- “We’ll add that to next year’s scope.”
- “The system can do it, but we can’t get approval fast enough.”
- “Let me check if our contract covers this.”
Your Salesforce platform is designed to evolve and adapt to support agency priorities. If you don’t have a growing list of ideas to improve it, you’re probably not getting its full value. The tipping point comes when you realize you’re spending more time managing the technology than putting it to work for the public.
The first step is understanding where you are now. Where are the hidden pain points in your Salesforce implementation? Where could you be getting more value?
Waves aligns your delivery with how agencies actually operate: start small, scale thoughtfully, adjust as priorities shift. All within the governance and procurement structures you already know.
For Procurement Conversations
If you’re in a contracting or budget role, the model above can work within familiar procurement structures—it’s just applied differently. Think time-based agreements with clear deliverables.
What matters most is that it gives your agency room to adapt without constant re-bidding. If your current setup creates friction whenever priorities shift, it’s worth exploring what that could look like.
Don’t let legacy procurement processes limit your agency’s potential. Begin by mapping your backlog, reviewing your contracted capacity usage, and identifying where improvements will make the most impact.
We can help you do exactly that, so you spend less time managing technology and more time advancing your mission.
