Revolutionizing Owner-Side Project Management With a Proactive Approach

By

Marc DiGuiseppe

and James Hamilton

Last Updated Mar 2, 2026

By

Marc DiGuiseppe

and James Hamilton

The risks facing owner-operators in renewable energy extend beyond the jobsite: They stack up over long development cycles, with complex permitting and utility sign-offs, plus handoffs from development to asset management. 

Catalyze is an independent power producer that uses software to source commercial and industrial solar and storage projects, oversee EPC contractors, and operate the assets. 

The company reduced owner-side risk by standardizing practices that make data actionable and communication and accountability clear. Here's a breakdown of their approach, with practical lessons for avoiding surprises and scaling portfolios without drowning teams in admin. 

Build the foundation: Centralize decisions and documents.

Decisions and documents only help when they’re organized and accessible.

Within its project management software, Catalyze maintains a single, central record for each project. The record spans GIS maps and utility data, permits, interconnection milestones, inspections and observations, punch and closeout items, and the decision history behind delay notices and approvals. 

Anyone, from a new project manager to an executive, can see exactly what happened, why, and what’s next. The central repository serves as institutional memory that standardizes expectations, supports continuous improvement, and enables clean handoffs.

We use [our project management software] as a repository of information and its tools as checks and balances. These are tools, not only for handoffs between different departments, to help navigate and historically file information. The ability to do that allows for the project manager to execute efficiently without being bombarded with a million questions and to focus on their primary responsibility, which is project management.

Marc DiGuiseppe

Vice President, Project Delivery

Catalyze

Standardize handoffs: Use checklists, criteria, and accountability.

Owners often lose time at handoffs, such as development to preconstruction or delivery to operations. Catalyze treats these gates as readiness checkpoints.

A kickoff checklist at acquisition validates scope, surfaces gaps, and converts open items into assigned actions before moving forward. 

Each handoff has defined readiness criteria and required artifacts (e.g. permit and interconnection status), so downstream teams get clear, consistent information. This reduces rework and creates comparable data across the portfolio.

Prevent surprises: Turn data into proactive controls.

Catalyze once faced common challenges: scrambling before expirations, reacting to surprises, slipping on deadlines. It responded by identifying likely pitfalls and planning parallel work.

Their shift to being proactive rests on a few simple, durable practices: 

• Permit and constraint register: A simple tracker for permits, interconnection milestones, dependencies, and expiration dates. Owners assign lead-time due dates (e.g., 45 days ahead) so mitigation happens before issues escalate.
• Decision and activity logs: Alongside requests, delay notices, and approvals, Catalyze records context, including what was requested, whether it was accepted, and why. This audit trail reduces disputes, improves decision-making, and lets leaders monitor progress on their own. 
• Notes on the critical path: Biweekly or weekly utility touchpoints are summarized in the system of record so leaders can track progress at a glance and project managers avoid repetitive reporting.

Owner-led quality: Define, verify, and enforce.

Quality is often treated as the contractor’s job. Catalyze treats it as a shared obligation, with the owner defining the standard and verifying it early.

Before scale introduces variability, the team sets “first-article benchmarks”— a sample section of work (a representative row, inverter, or transformer) built to standard. 

Site-review observations are tracked and reviewed in weekly meetings, so issues are fixed before work proceeds. Clear technical specifications make expectations official and enforceable. 

By closeout, 90 to 100% of upstream documentation and quality checks should be complete, allowing project managers to focus on punch, closeout checks, and turnover. 

Predict and improve: Leverage portfolio data.

Catalyze turns project data into portfolio insights to improve forecasts and decisions. It tracks schedule and budget variance and how contingencies are used, so trends in timing and cost are visible and credible.

Catalyze also calibrates partner risk by monitoring contractor performance through change order frequency, documentation timeliness, schedule delay severity, and administrative follow-through. 

Protect PM focus: Communicate efficiently.

Project managers should spend more time managing and less time reporting.

By logging decisions and critical-path updates in one place, Catalyze allows executives and stakeholders to get progress and context without pinging the field.

It further reduces email traffic by preserving correspondence and decision history, so context survives even as people rotate off a project. 

Catalyze’s Transformative Approach

Catalyze has expanded its operating capacity from roughly 40 megawatts (MW) in 2023 to about 180 MW in 2024 and approximately 300 MW in 2025, with a target of about 450 MW in 2026. It has also reached EBITDA positive, underscoring operational discipline behind the growth. 

Catalyze’s next phase focuses on sharpening the system: formal postmortems to spot patterns, adding productivity/velocity tracking to measure progress against plan, and translating weather and regional risk from experts into data that informs forecasts.

More than any single tool, Catalyze’s success is driven by proactive, standardized practices that make long, complex projects repeatable and measurable.

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Written by

Marc DiGuiseppe

Vice President, Project Delivery | Catalyze

Marc Diguiseppe is a renewable energy executive with more than 14 years of experience spanning residential, commercial, and utility-scale solar sectors. Based in Purchase, NY, he currently serves as the Vice President of Project Delivery at Catalyze, where he oversees the execution of complex distributed energy portfolios.

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James Hamilton

Writer & Producer

87 articles

James Hamilton is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York with experience in television, documentaries, journalism, comedy, and podcasts. His work has been featured on VICE TV and on The Moth. James was a writer and narrator for the show, VICE News Tonight, where he won an Emmy Award and was nominated for a Peabody Award.

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