England Sevens coach Ben Ryan has given some insight into how difficult it has been working inside Rob Andrew's elite rugby department during the last year.

Ryan says he fears that valuable preparation time for the Olympics has been wasted while the Rugby Football Union (RFU) were engulfed in civil war after John Steele's departure as chief executive.

Ryan wants urgent action to be taken to get English Rugby back on track as England, Scotland, Wales and potentially Northern Ireland need to urgently find a way to enter a unified Great Britain team into the 2016 Rio Olympics.

The RFU have started getting their house in order and the appointment of a new chief executive will give the organisation much stability.

And Ryan believes that appointment cannot come soon enough and said, "It is always unsettling to have a lot of movement around your department or your team."

"It hasn't been a particularly easy ride for anyone in the last year," Ryan told UKPA.

"There are lots of things that wouldn't necessarily be as good as you would have liked. "

"The atmosphere once John Steele left took a bit of a battering and it is not going to solve itself overnight.

"I have been amazed that people have been able to get on with what they have to do."

Ryan's big concern is that the plan to create a unified Great Britain Sevens team has stalled.

"Both ourselves and Scotland were minus a CEO for a while and that has meant that some of the finer points on how we put the GB side together has halted for a little bit," Ryan said.

"We need a concerted and integrated approach to make sure the womens' and the mens' programmes get every chance so when we come to Rio qualification in 2014 nobody can look back on it and say they weren't well prepared.

"Time is running out pretty quickly for that. When the dust hopefully settles in the imminent future, everybody needs to get together and knock it all together pretty quickly."