Nowadays studies confirm that change continues to occur in project management in both the practitioners and research fields. Organizations increasingly use projects to achieve business objectives but results often fall short of goals. Although project management has become a core business process for many organizations at strategic and operational level, there is still much to understand about project actuality in software development organizations. Besides, much is written about how to manage projects, but too little on what really happens in Project Actuality. Traditional theories used to understand and explain the world of management make different assumptions about actuality, scientific knowledge, ethics, values and project management context. The need to better observe and understand project management practice, leads us to look for alternative experimental approaches to support our studies. Ethnography’s methodological principles state that the purpose of social research is the understanding of human behavior of a particular group, its social interactions, rituals, culture and customs. In order to understand the challenges faced by software development project nowadays we have to go beyond the triple constraint (cost, schedule and scope), its process or technology involved. To manage projects we must understand how project team member react to daily routine, problems, context, the entire project actuality phenomenon. This paper is a result of a research that intends to understand, explain and explore this phenomenon. Its main objective is to present unveil the project management actuality’s findings of seven small software development organizations and a small team in Brazil and present the approach used to investigate and analyze software project actuality. Even though the findings are context dependent, some causes, effects, disturbance factors can help the understanding of this sector and assist researches and practitioners to see new ways of thinking project management in Brazilian Micro and Small Enterprises (MSEs) context.