The John Deere Health Pan was conceived of to provide quality health care at reasonable costs for its many employees, and also for its non-employees in Deere and Company in the states of Illinois and Iowa and Tennessee and Virginia. (McCollum, John Deere Health cultivates successful IT Project Management) What Michael McCollum felt was that his IT department was like the IT Department at many other corporations, with many more projects than appropriate resources for them, and no practical and effective method with which to prioritize them, and to make a definitive analysis of which project would have a greater impact on the company, and which the least. In the same way, the organization lacked the means by which a particular project could be assigned with appropriate resources to the appropriate person, and more often than not, priority was decided on the requestor's persistent efforts, or on his management skills to get his job done first. The words one would hear most often were 'Why can't it get done?' This was when the management decided to get an IT management portfolio done, and therefore, a cross functional team of four IT people for each line of the business were assigned, and it was their task thereafter to decide on the various requirements for a prioritization process, among them the primary object being to create a framework around the goals of the company. (McCollum, John Deere Health cultivates successful IT Project Management)

In general, whenever a new project is submitted to the company the requestor for the project is expected to answer a series of questions, like for example, the customer benefit expected, the number of benefits required, and the resources required for the purpose, so that the prioritization would be decided. Each and every project thus submitted would then be assigned a score level of low, at a 7, to a high, at a 142. This virtually eliminated the guesswork out of prioritization, and it also had the added advantage of tackling easier and faster projects first that is, those projects that would need very little time and resources. This...

This happened because of the fact that by assigning a number of prioritization to all projects, business and IT were working together, all of a sudden, on all the projects, right form the very beginning. The management found that they were actually turning down projects, and this was because when the noticed that the prioritization number was very low, they would think whether the project must be done or not, and this would help them eliminate that particular project if necessary, and thus save valuable time and resources. In fact, the cost of running the entire show was being cut down, because now the organization would only take what it could finish quickly, and the simpler ones would be handled faster. (McCollum, John Deere Health cultivates successful IT Project Management)
When each project is matched to one particular and relevant resource's workload and capabilities, then it would mean that a one stop shop for project managers and their resources would be provided, and this would mean that prioritization would be possible in the face of a heavy IT load, and this would be of great benefit and advantage to the company and its management, and of course, to the customers of John Deere. (McCollum, John Deere Health cultivates successful IT Project Management) The first step that the management of John Deere Health undertook was to upgrade Plan View to a newer version in its effort to plan out a prioritization IT portfolio for its company. (John Deere Health cultivates successful IT Project Management -- IT Information: White Papers, Product Literature, Webcasts and Case Studies) few years ago, the IT Department of Oakland County was in a situation where it had