Capital One Agile Maturity Assessment Tool; Future of Lithium Ion Battery Standardization

While I found deep love and joy for both my technical and STS research topics, I was
unable to find an intersect between the two thus will be discussing them separately in this
sociotechnical synthesis. For my STS topic I researched the market battle for lithium ion battery
standardization, specifically the present-day substandard recycling processes these lithium ion
battery packs in Electric Vehicles.
For my technical topic, I will discuss my past work experience as a Software Engineer
Intern at Capital One Financial in the summer of 2021. During the internship myself and a team
built an Agile Maturity Assessment tool to standardize agile working methodologies across
different lines of businesses and Capital One as a whole in aims to create more efficiency and
accountability across the company.
During my work as an intern on the Agile Maturity Assessment team, I set out to find the
best features to add to the product in order to increase the user base, uniformity across teams, and
user experience. To accomplish this, I created several demos and incorporated many rounds of
feedback into modifying the source code each week. The most important results from the
assessment tool were the time saved by managers and division directors by cutting out activities
that were losing productivity and emphasizing on areas that increased efficiency.
In my STS research I aimed to find the stakeholders for and against standardization of
lithium ion electric vehicle batteries. To accomplish this, I analyzed several sources from
scholarly articles to government written publications and corporate focused articles. The largest
findings were that there is large difficulty in uniforming all EV batteries as this would require a
total redesign of battery packs and automobile designs as a whole.
For the technical topic project, everything I set out to accomplish was completed. All
features listed at the start of the internship were finished and lead into return offers for all four
interns on the team. Some of the adversity that was necessary to overcome was the lack of
experience in the technologies of the pre-existing application, however with the aid of the
managers and other interns, everything was caught up to speed relatively quickly.
For the STS topic, the project was extremely fruitful as I found several stakeholders both
for and against standardization of EV battery packs. I was able to form my own recommendation
on how to standardize the batteries based on the view points from these stakeholders in a
confident and educated manner. Some of the next areas to focus on for the next researchers are
finding more technical methods of standardization as well as more stakeholders against
standardization.

School of Engineering and Applied Science
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
Technical Advisor: John Hott
STS Advisor: Sean Ferguson
Technical Team Members: Jonathan Mo