Stories have always been present in the life of people as a part of their culture, it is a rather ancient narrative technique. The message delivered in a form of a story is specifically appealing to listeners, which makes it a powerful communication tool. The thesis explores storytelling practices in project management by answering the question: “How project managers use storytelling in new business process implementation in ICT projects?” The choice of the topic was driven by the gap in the literature and the choice of context was chosen by the level of maturity of project management in ICT industry. Within the framework of interpretivist research paradigm, the data was collected by interviewing ten project managers of new business process implementation in ICT projects. The thesis findings suggest that storytelling in implementation of new business processes in ICT projects is used in formal and informal forums in written and verbal format. Project managers use storytelling to pursue several goals: making sense of ICT projects, human resource management, promoting adaptation to new business processes, knowledge management and attracting new customers and investments into ICT projects. Storytelling in ICT projects is also limited by storytelling conditions, such as organizational culture, extent of change, governance structure. Storytelling in projects is subject to challenges, such as logistics and timeliness of practices. From the practical point of view, the thesis explores storytelling as an effective communication tool that can be used for multiple goals in project management. It allows adding storytelling to the requirement list of new soft competences of project managers. The thesis has bridged a literature gap between storytelling and project management, which opens new theoretical perspective of interpreting the reality in projects and creates space for further research.

Change has become the norm as knowledge economy organisations aim to build agile people, process, and technology practises to ensure future sustainability. Leaders have been criticised due to the inability to manage sustainable and meaningful change that will navigate the future success of the organisation. The research will explore leaders’ stories during an organisational change journey in order to determine the story type and subsequent meaning associated with leadership stories during organisational transformation. The research utilised a qualitative narrative inquiry research design to explore multiple leadership stories. Thematic network analysis was used to explore the themes identified within the leaders’ stories and to identify the themes of meaning evident beneath the surface. The research findings contribute to the field of Organisational Psychology by providing leaders with a framework for navigating sustainable change journeys, and explore current leadership practices that contribute to the high rate of current organisational change failures. / Industrial & Organisational Psychology / M. A.

Change has become the norm as knowledge economy organisations aim to build agile people, process, and technology practises to ensure future sustainability. Leaders have been criticised due to the inability to manage sustainable and meaningful change that will navigate the future success of the organisation. The research will explore leaders’ stories during an organisational change journey in order to determine the story type and subsequent meaning associated with leadership stories during organisational transformation. The research utilised a qualitative narrative inquiry research design to explore multiple leadership stories. Thematic network analysis was used to explore the themes identified within the leaders’ stories and to identify the themes of meaning evident beneath the surface. The research findings contribute to the field of Organisational Psychology by providing leaders with a framework for navigating sustainable change journeys, and explore current leadership practices that contribute to the high rate of current organisational change failures. / Industrial and Organisational Psychology / M. A.