Here's an interesting article I ran across today. Some of you may cringe at the thought of reading about Six Sigma in your spare time and some probably don't even know what it is. For those who don't know, Six Sigma is a business tool that focuses on eliminating variation in processes. This article applies the Six Sigma method to ball golf. Much of it applies to disc golf, too. Either way, it's interesting to read and could help focus some peoples' practice routines. You need Acrobat Reader to view it.

http://www.qimacros.com/pdf/golf.pdf

I once sat down and started writing some DGEI CMM process documents for tournament generation. "DGEI" being "Disc Golf Engineering Institute".

Fortunately, I got over it before I started doing Level-5 assessments on the tourneys that I went too. :)

Should I revist it and resume work under the CMMi paradigm, or should I jump straight to an Agile model?

definitele go straight to Agile. its a far more flexible methodology and focuses on the now rather than a turtuously pre-defined plan.

Thanks for the link, Scott.

I have found that some articles and books on ball golf can also apply to the world of disc golf. This wasn't one of those though, imo. While there's some carryover in the Variation and Mind Game sections, the article primarily focuses on:

a) Keeping track of drives left or right of center and long or short to try to identify patterns in your play. In disc golf, it's rare to have more than a few holes per course where you are just trying to drive long and straight; usually you are trying to thread a fairway in the woods or throw a hyzer or anhyzer to get close to a polehole, so that's not really applicable.

b) reducing strokes in the short game. They make a big deal that 80% of all shots lost to par occur with 100 yards of the hole. The short game and putting is much more critical in ball golf than in disc golf, where there are far fewer shots around the green.

I still think most of it applies. The article suggests picking one type of shot (irons, short game, putting) and identifying "misses" (long, short, right and left). For disc golf the types of shots would be different (hyzer, anhyzer, straight, putts, rollers, thumbers, etc) and the misses may have different values (high, low, left, right for putting or worm burner, stall out, left, right, short, long for drives) but the method is the same. The idea is to gather data, focus on which part of your game needs improvement and work to eliminate misses, starting with the most common ones. The article aludes to it, but chances are that for any given shot there will be one type of miss that will be much more common and will be the obvious one to fix right away.

The numbers aren't the same, but anyone could take data down for all of the courses they play and figure out how many shots are taken from each distance. I'm willing to bet that you'd end up with graphs similar to what they had in that article but with different lengths. I'm guessing that being able to end up with a gimme putt after any throw from 200' in would lower many people's scores.

Also, understand that this will be more helpful for the novice to intermediate golfer than the advanced to pro. Someone of your skill level has probably already fixed many of the problems that this type of process would address. (NOTE: that wasn't meant to be scarcasm. Your rating is probably 100 points higher than what mine would be if I were rated.) In short, it's just a way to work on your consistancy and to focus your practice on what you really need to work on rather than what you think you need to work on.

that was a very good pdf file. especially cuz it had enuf business aspects i didnt get in trouble when our IT ExecVP caught me looking at it this afternoon.

most important take-aways:

track your results.
if its broken, practice it. (rounds are not practice. 20-40 discs in a field is practice)
throw high percentage shots that yield high percentage next shots.