The sequence, and who controls each step
The order rarely changes. What changes is how long each step takes and, crucially, who is holding it.
Site survey. Someone confirms what the salesperson sold: roof condition and framing, panel capacity, main breaker rating, meter location, and shading. This is the first place a sold job can turn out to be a different job. You control the scheduling here.
Final design and plan set. The design becomes a permit-ready package, usually including a stamped plan set. If the survey contradicted what was sold, this is where the redesign happens, and a redesign this late quietly resets several downstream steps. You largely control this.
Permitting. The authority having jurisdiction, usually a city or county building department, reviews and issues a building permit. You control the quality and completeness of what you file. You do not control the queue.
Interconnection. In parallel, the utility reviews an application to connect the system to the grid. This is a separate process from permitting, with a separate reviewer and a separate queue, and confusing the two is a common source of "I thought that was already approved".
Installation. The crew builds it. This is the step installers are best at and it is usually the shortest one on the calendar, which is worth sitting with: the thing your company is actually expert at occupies a minority of the project's elapsed time.
Inspection. A local inspector verifies the installed system against the approved plans. Field changes that diverge from what was approved are the classic reason a project fails here.
PTO. The utility grants permission to operate. Until this lands, the system does not legally produce, and on third-party-owned projects the final slice of the installer's payment is typically held until it does.
Why two jobs sold the same day finish weeks apart
Because almost every step above contains a queue you do not control, and queues do not run at a constant rate.
A permit office that turns work around in days most of the year slows during a seasonal surge. A utility's interconnection backlog grows when a policy change pulls demand forward. An inspector's calendar has a different shape in one jurisdiction than the next one over. None of this is visible from inside your CRM, and none of it is your fault, but all of it lands on your schedule and your cash.
The practical consequence is that project duration is not a property of the job. It is a property of the job plus the jurisdiction plus the moment. An office that plans as if projects take a fixed number of weeks will be wrong in both directions constantly, and the corrective is not a better estimate. It is knowing, on any given day, which specific jobs are waiting and on whom.
What you actually control
The steps above split cleanly into two groups, and the split is where operational effort should go.
You control the quality of what you submit. Clean plan sets that match what was surveyed, as-built documentation that matches what was approved, and complete, accurate interconnection applications. Errors here are the single largest avoidable source of delay, because a rejection does not just cost the review time, it sends you to the back of the queue.
You control how fast you react. A permit correction that sits unread for four days is four days you added. This is where most recoverable time is lost, and it is lost quietly: nobody decides to ignore a correction notice, it simply arrives in one person's inbox while that person is doing something else.
You do not control the queues. Once a complete, correct application is in, the review time belongs to the reviewer.
That division is the whole operational argument. Effort spent trying to accelerate a utility is mostly wasted. Effort spent making sure nothing sits in your own building, and that every submission is right the first time, compounds across every job you run.
Where the money sits in all of this
On third-party-owned projects, the payment schedule is layered on top of this same sequence, and it does not pay evenly.
Contract no longer pays a meaningful amount, so the installer fronts design, permitting, equipment, and labor. The bulk of the payment is released after installation and after the funder approves the submitted documentation. A final slice is held back until PTO.
That means the two longest-waiting steps in the sequence, the permitting and interconnection stretch before install and the PTO wait after it, are both periods where the installer is carrying the cost of a project. For a company running dozens of concurrent jobs, those overlapping waits are what determine how much cash is tied up at any moment, and they are set largely by queues nobody in your office controls.