You are not alone if you are feeling stressed or frustrated because your supervisor just handed you an employee review form and asked you to fill it out in an impossibly short period of time. This is the 'annual performance review' ritual in most companies. A lot is at stake – what you're paid, your career path, and maybe even your job. Here are some suggestions to take charge of the process and make it work for you.

Eliminate surprises in your performance review: Talk to your supervisor about setting up one or two meetings to informally discuss your performance before the final review session takes place. Do these over coffee or lunch if no other time is available to either of you. Your objective in the informal sessions is to understand what your supervisor thinks about your performance. This will let you tailor an appropriate and well supported response for the official performance review meeting. You may also want to ask some trusted peers about how they perceive your performance and how others view you in the organization.

Whether you are constructing a loading dock, developing a payroll application or building the ultimate widget, the rules followed by experienced project managers can help you.

Project management, which used to be the domain of information technology and manufacturing experts, has moved into the mainstream.

"It's now one of the most important business drivers that we see," says Chris Peacock, senior practice leader with the Canadian Management Centre in Toronto. "It's a new way of doing business that is widely applicable."

Mr. Peacock says that many industry sectors and government departments are turning to project management ideas, which include people skills as well as technical training.

The trend that has seen hundreds of thousands of North American high-tech jobs shift offshore will continue for the rest of the decade, but experts predict most IT jobs will remain here. "Entire business functions, such as customer service functions or call centres, are being transferred offshore," says Tony Small, chief executive officer of Axceleron Consulting of Toronto and a former partner at Deloitte Consulting. When these departments move, all the related support infrastructure, including technology, is dragged along, Mr. Small says. "Many types of positions, especially those that can be transparent to the organization, or done in relative isolation, are candidates for offshore outsourcing."

Companies are facing urgent, short-term staffing needs but do not want to spend their money on recruitment fees or other hiring-related expenses, and this is creating new possibilities for job-seekers with networking skills. One approach involves personal referrals from friends and colleagues, which can be leveraged to get in front of a prospective employer that needs to solve an immediate staffing problem. A second approach involves talent pools -- loose collections of people with related skills that share business contacts, information, and job opportunities.

Many organizations lose competitive advantage every time their employees meet or exceed personal performance metrics. Although it may not be apparent at the end of a fiscal quarter, or even several quarters, focusing exclusively on a few key objectives, such as revenue and cost controls, or even number of hits on a web site, can cause significant damage to an organization's health by the behaviors that are being instilled in employees and the corporate culture that is being created.