Occasionally something will come along that requires a temporary extra effort, to deliver a specific thing by a given date. It would be useful if you could demonstrate the costs, benefits and final outcomes before you put in the extra effort and then were able to evidence that you have achieved what you set out to do at the end.
It would be even more useful if you could show evidence of the return on investment afterwards and collate all the things you would do differently next time or even make a note of the things you did so well that you would want to try that again if another project came along. These are the basic principles of project management.
There are several different bodies (Prince2, PMP/PMBOK, ITIL, PMI, Agile, PMO MSP to name but a few) who train people to follow a sometimes complicated and subjective set of rules and processes to achieve the above. You might say that you need to follow different practices for one sort of project and another for something else, however, there is no substitute for broad project delivery experience.
We run our projects by using a well practiced set of principles. We create structure along with a consistent approach. Our library of project tools include template business cases, project initiation documents, project plans, reporting packs, as well as RAID (risks, assumptions, issues, dependencies) logs, lessons learn templates and workshop support.