Storytelling Practices in Project Management : Exploratory study in new business process implementation in Information and Communication Technology projects

Abstract: 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.