Software Project Management Challenges with Information Security : An Investigative Analysis on effectively managing project security

The purpose of this thesis is to provide a fact-based, theoretically sound, and neutral study of the role project managers play in identifying risks within software project security and how they effectively mitigate these risks. Our paper primarily revolves around the question of “What are the key challenges associated with software projects concerning information security and what actions are taken by project managers to mitigate these?” To help answer this, we created two supporting questions. Our first stating “How do project managers determine the importance of security challenges in software projects, and what methods are used to identify the most critical challenges?” Our second question is “What practices are commonly implemented by project managers to mitigate the security challenges?” The main challenges we cover throughout our thesis are: General Data Protection, Technological Innovations, and Standards & Regulations. Understanding these challenges is crucial for project managers to successfully lead teams. In our paper, we discuss the importance of not only understanding these challenges but how to effectively mitigate them. For our methodology, we used the qualitative method of both structured and semi-structured interviews with experienced project managers and executives in various sectors of the software field with direct responsibility for incorporating and establishing information security within their projects. The interviews helped us gather a deeper understanding of the challenges faced and mitigation strategies they implemented through their years of experience. Through the use of our theoretical frameworks, we discuss the efficiency of mitigation practices used by project managers as a result of project priorities. In our conclusion, we answer our research questions and identify key challenges and mitigation methods of these problems. Our study contributes to the software industry by providing a comprehensive framework for effectively ide