Q&A with Simon Bell, Technical Director for Platform Services at Mott MacDonald

‘We see the future as platforms becoming the operating layer for AI-enabled organisations’

Mott MacDonald is a finalist in the Platform Engineering/SRE Team of the Year category in Computing's Cloud Excellence Awards.

Simon Bell is Technical Director for Platform Services at Mott MacDonald, leading the teams responsible for enterprise platform engineering, developer experience, cloud services, data, AI enablement and operational excellence.

Under his leadership, Platform Services has transformed Moata Workspaces into an enterprise-scale platform capability supporting digital delivery across the business.

Simon is passionate about platform engineering, AI adoption and creating high-performing teams that deliver measurable business outcomes.

The cloud industry moves at an incredible pace, but many of the most impactful achievements happen behind the scenes. Awards such as the Cloud Excellence Awards provide an opportunity to recognise the teams, partnerships and engineering disciplines that enable organisations to innovate at scale.

They also create an important platform for sharing best practice. Organisations face many of the same challenges around security, governance, scalability and AI adoption. Celebrating successful approaches helps the industry learn from each other and raises the standard for everyone.

Most importantly, they recognise the people behind the technology. Successful cloud programmes are rarely the result of a single team or supplier. They are built through strong collaboration, shared goals and sustained commitment over many years.

What would winning this award mean to your company and team?

Winning would be fantastic recognition for a team that has spent the last several years building the foundations that enable digital delivery across Mott MacDonald.

Platform Services exists to help hundreds of engineers, developers, data specialists and project teams deliver solutions securely and efficiently. Much of that work is invisible when it is working well. This award would recognise not only the technology we have built, but also the operating model, engineering practices and partnerships that have enabled us to scale successfully.

It would also recognise the strength of the partnership between Mott MacDonald and Plural. The value for us has been the way Plural’s platform and support have helped provide a stronger foundation for Workspaces, allowing us to scale the capability, manage our estate more effectively and give teams a more consistent route to deliver securely.

What is your company's proudest achievement over the past year?

Our proudest achievement has been transforming Moata Workspaces from a platform into a strategic enterprise capability.

Over the last year we have focused on creating a secure, scalable and repeatable approach to digital delivery. Rather than individual teams solving the same problems repeatedly, we have established common foundations that accelerate delivery while improving governance, security and operational resilience.

What makes this achievement particularly significant is that it has been accomplished through partnership. By combining Mott MacDonald’s enterprise platform services capability with the foundations provided by Plural, we have strengthened Workspaces as an enterprise platform, improved our ability to manage growth across the estate and created a more reliable base for future digital delivery.

The result is a platform that is helping teams across the organisation deliver digital solutions more quickly and with greater confidence than ever before.

What have been the biggest challenges of the year so far, and how have you overcome them?

The biggest challenge has been balancing rapid growth in demand with the need to maintain platform reliability, governance and security.

The emergence of AI has significantly increased expectations around delivery speed and access to cloud capabilities. At the same time, organisations cannot compromise on resilience, compliance or operational standards.

We addressed this challenge by focusing on platform engineering principles rather than individual projects. We invested in automation, standardisation, reusable pathways and common services that allow teams to move faster without increasing risk.

Plural’s platform and specialist support have also been important. They have helped us strengthen the foundations behind Workspaces so we can scale more confidently, improve consistency across delivery teams and maintain the governance and operational standards expected of an enterprise platform.

What are the key demands you have seen from your customers in the last 12 months?

The biggest shift has been the move from cloud adoption to cloud value realisation. Customers are no longer asking whether they should use cloud technologies. Instead, they want to understand how cloud platforms can accelerate innovation, enable AI, improve developer productivity and deliver measurable business outcomes.

There is also a growing expectation that platforms should be simple to consume. Users want secure, governed services that can be accessed quickly without navigating unnecessary complexity.

This has reinforced our focus on building standardised pathways and self-service capabilities through Workspaces. The goal is to make it easier for teams to innovate whilst ensuring the organisation maintains the controls required to operate at enterprise scale.

Which new technology trend are you placing your bets on?

The trend we are most excited about is the convergence of platform engineering, secure enterprise data and AI.

Many organisations are focused on AI tools, but the real differentiator will be the platforms that make AI safe, scalable and operationally sustainable. Without strong foundations in identity, governance, data management and developer experience, AI initiatives struggle to move beyond experimentation.

We see the future as platforms becoming the operating layer for AI-enabled organisations. The organisations that succeed will be those that invest in reusable capabilities, secure data pathways and standardised engineering practices.

That is why our roadmap is focused not only on new technologies, but on the platform capabilities that allow them to be adopted safely, consistently and at scale. The foundations we have built with Plural give us a stronger base to extend Workspaces responsibly, while continuing to manage reliability, governance and operational resilience across the estate.

About Mott MacDonald

Mott MacDonald is a global employee-owned engineering, management and development consultancy delivering engineering, management and digital solutions that improve outcomes for clients and communities worldwide. By combining deep industry expertise with leading digital capabilities, Mott MacDonald is helping transform the way infrastructure and engineering projects are designed, delivered and operated.

About Plural Labs

Plural Labs is a cloud platform engineering company focused on simplifying the deployment and operation of complex software platforms. As a strategic partner to Mott MacDonald, Plural has played a key role in enabling the Digital Workspaces platform, helping teams deliver secure, scalable and cloud-native solutions faster and more reliably. Through its technology and expertise, Plural supports the modern software delivery capabilities that underpin Mott MacDonald's digital transformation journey.