Communication sounds like a simple matter, you might say. How many of us have sat in the same office though next to someone, and emailed them instead of actually speaking to them? Most of us, right?

In today’s fast-paced workplace, we can all be confronted with a painful paradox. We are faced with the continuous pressure of accelerating workload and projects, but this “need for speed” can result in communication failure. Moreover, this communication failure can lead to dangerous effects such as risking quality and value of work.

Operating a pension scheme can be very complex and involve many people, multiple systems & interfaces to implement complex legislation and scheme design. None of these remain constant for very long and can easily cause an operation to become inefficient and expensive to run.

With the Department of Work and Pensions making changes to the automatic enrolment regulations on 1 April 2015, most companies are going to have to make big changes to the software systems they have already developed. Many smaller companies may not have yet developed a system at all.

Any one who is close to me will know that I don’t like being out of my comfort zone, so when after being in my job for 2 and a half years I am asked to contribute to writing blogs for the company, you can probably imagine my reaction!

So many things went through my head! ‘I can’t write a blog – I’m not clever enough’ ‘what do I write about?’ How do I try and make it tie in with what the company does… AGILE! Tough one huh! Well for me I thought it would be impossible until I came across this quote:

The secret to getting ahead is getting started. The secret to getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.