Whether speaking about enterprise architecture or design within a project, guiding principles are paramount to keeping your focus on what's important to guiding decisions. Some examples of these would be software re-use over creation, and simplicity over flexibility to make things more maintainable. It's important to establish what your guiding principles are prior to having multiple teams making decisions either based on uniform principles or using their own discretion.
This importance to me was illustrated clearly with a little-known rule in the NFL. As a big NFL fan, you would expect with their use of instant replay and reviewing all scoring plays and turnovers, their guiding principle would be the correctness of ruling plays that directly affect the outcome of the game. However, as reinforced by an ill-fated decision made recently by the coach of the Detroit, if you throw a challenge flag on one of these plays, it renders the play un-reviewable and your team gets penalized 15 yards. I'm guessing the purpose of the rule is to ensure coaches don't try to become too demonstrative against the officials, but the end result is not getting the play called correctly in some cases.
Had they determined a guiding principle was to ensure plays are called accurately (e.g. accuracy over punishment), this rule would never have been ratified, which has now resulted in a situation the possibly changed the course of a game for a team. Having a handful of these guiding principles, a small enough number that allows remembering them clearly across teams, will ensure your organization is uniformly making decisions that can impact projects going forward.
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