Developing CM3: Maintainers' Education and Training at ABB

A highly skilled maintainer is the most important organisational asset pivotal for achieving quality software, strategic for improving maintenance and development processes, essential for remaining competitive and critical for business survival. This requires that universities properly prepare students to enter the maintenance workforce and that maintenance organisations actively build and maintain their human knowledge and skill base. In this paper, we present Corrective Maintenance Maturity Model (CM 3): Maintainers' Education and Training – a maturity model for educating and training maintenance engineers within corrective maintenance. This model is presently being developed at ABB by the Software Maintenance Laboratory (SML). Our goal is to provide guidance to ABB and industrial organisations worldwide in the process of building or improving their most important asset – people. Each process element presented in this paper is matched against its corresponding process element at ABB. Hence, this paper may also be regarded as a report on the state of the current practice of educating and training maintainers at ABB.