Project leaders digital Capabilities: A sentiment analysis perspective

Technologies like artificial intelligence and big data analytics can contribute positively to the management of a project. To sense and seize the associated benefits of technology, project leaders themselves need certain digital capabilities. There is an uncertainty what these digital capabilities are as digital capabilities are typically associated with disciplines like education and health care. The purpose of this article is two-fold: (i) identify relevant digital capabilities and (ii) explore how project leaders can identify and incorporate these digital capabilities to the benefit of the team and the project. To the achieve this purpose, sentiment analysis was used as well as the conducting of two focus groups. Sentiment analysis was used to identify digital capabilities from literature. The focus groups were used to uncover the lived experience of project leaders regarding digital capabilities. Triangulation was done between the results of the sentiment analysis to construct the required digital capabilities. The results indicate that there are 13 generic digital capabilities focusing on technology whereas 12 project-specific digital capabilities are more of a cognitive nature. The results of the sentiment analysis also indicate that project leaders are overwhelmingly negative towards project management digitalisation. The usage of sentiment analysis contributes to the originality of the article. Also, the 25 digital capabilities were mapped upon the Dynamic Capabilities aspects of sensing, seizing and reconfiguration. This research advances our theoretical understanding of the required digital capabilities. Practically, it provides a framework for developing digital project leaders addressing a gap in existing literature. • Sentiment analysis is an alternative research approach to identify opinions. • Digital project leadership includes both generic and project-specific capabilities. • 25 capabilities were mapped to sensing, seizing, and reconfiguring aspects. • Digital leadership include digital, technology and innovation capabilities.