Successful Partnerships: Collaborative and Coordinated Solutions to Baccalaureate Attainment

ABSTRACT

Higher education, specifically community colleges, has had increased pressure of accountability for students' outcomes. Many community colleges have gravitated toward collaborative programs to help ensure students complete associate degrees and to create more access to baccalaureate degrees. These partnership programs benefit from a coordinated approach and a formation of the partnership collective identity with shared goals and vision, but the end product is often uncoordinated. The purpose of this practice brief is to provide higher education leaders with recommendations based on the evidence in the research literature related to partnership management and strategic collaboration. How to effectively coordinate and manage partnerships, particularly focusing on building and sustaining the cooperative network of institutions, as well as discovering solutions and strategies, specifically utilizing the scrum methodology are contained herein.