Q. What level of project management do I need?
A. This is a complicated question to answer for the reason that it very much depends on the size duration and technical complexity of the project as well as how many people are involved. Several projects have been effectively run by a project manager keeping it all in his head. That perhaps fine but when the project manager falls sick so does the project! If you are managing a project for someone else (your client) then at a very minimum you should plan on ways and means to track the definition of the client's requirements and / or assumptions made the standard of quality agreed upon that will serve the client's purpose the time available for completion and the budget for the work.
As projects increase in complexity and size increasingly sophisticated systems and procedures are available to track all of these core functions. On even larger projects it may perhaps well be necessary to have trained and dedicated staff attending to every function separately.