MPS Hanseatic GmbH

MPS Hanseat­ic GmbH (Man­age­ment – Pro­duc­tion – Ser­vice) is a Ham­burg-based artist man­age­ment and book­ing agency, focused on build­ing sus­tain­able live careers in rock and met­al. Through its Sea­side Enter­tain­ment divi­sion, MPS is one of the main book­ing con­tacts for some of Europe’s biggest rock and met­al events — includ­ing Wack­en Open Air and the Full Met­al Enter­tain­ment for­mats (Full Met­al Cruise, Full Met­al Hol­i­day), along­side fes­ti­vals such as Dong Open Air.

The team has run the busi­ness for over a decade, grow­ing from a hand­ful of peo­ple into a full agency — with most of its oper­a­tional know-how built up through expe­ri­ence rather than writ­ten down.

MPS deliv­ers a lot, and deliv­ers it well. But the team was con­stant­ly stretched. It’s tempt­ing to put that down to knowl­edge liv­ing in peo­ple’s heads — and that is part of it — but the more urgent prob­lem was the lack of struc­ture and shared stan­dards in how the team worked.

Every­one worked from their own expe­ri­ence, and in what­ev­er way felt best to them:

• No shared home for work. Some ran projects out of the inbox; oth­ers kept a Google Doc per project, each with its own check­lists and sep­a­rate task sheets. There was nev­er one place where all projects and all tasks lived, with fil­ters sur­fac­ing what mat­tered.
• The inbox as oper­at­ing sys­tem. The work­ing day ran large­ly from Out­look — tasks picked up, del­e­gat­ed and tracked by email.
• Process­es as habits, not records. Ways of work­ing lived in peo­ple’s rou­tines; it lat­er became clear the team had nev­er had a way to cap­ture how they actu­al­ly work.
• Scat­tered con­tact data. Con­tacts sat across Excel lists, Out­look and pri­vate address books on peo­ple’s phones, with no sin­gle, reli­able source.
• Key-per­son depen­den­cy. The know-how to run the busi­ness sat with three to five peo­ple, held as expe­ri­ence rather than shared knowl­edge.

The real pres­sure is growth. The way MPS oper­at­ed as a hand­ful of peo­ple does­n’t scale to a team sev­er­al times the size. What was once an advan­tage — every­one hold­ing it all in their heads, work­ing their own way — becomes the bot­tle­neck.

“The biggest chal­lenge for us as a depart­ment is that a con­crete shared data foun­da­tion is miss­ing, so we’re repeat­ed­ly lim­it­ed by indi­vid­ual capac­i­ty.” — HW

The goal is to build struc­ture and change, long term, how the com­pa­ny works. That means mak­ing expe­ri­en­tial knowl­edge acces­si­ble to every­one, not only the peo­ple who hold it today.

The order mat­ters: first the struc­tures, then the behav­iour change that makes them stick.

• One cen­tral hub. A sin­gle place the team starts from every day — projects and tasks, con­tact data, and process­es togeth­er.
• Per­mis­sions that grow with peo­ple. Access that keeps infor­ma­tion avail­able while pro­tect­ing it from being over­writ­ten by peo­ple still find­ing their feet in the tool.
• Gen­uine adop­tion above all. The team actu­al­ly work­ing this way, day to day.

“The real­i­sa­tion how we can struc­ture our work in the future.” — JM

The Sys­tem Trans­for­ma­tion — a six-month engage­ment run­ning from dis­cov­ery through to refine­ment, in four phas­es: Dis­cov­ery → Build & Iter­ate → Enable & Launch → Refine.

Discovery

Most of the dis­cov­ery went into under­stand­ing how MPS actu­al­ly works — hard pre­cise­ly because so much ran on expe­ri­ence and so lit­tle on struc­ture. The team could­n’t eas­i­ly describe their own ways of work­ing, so dis­cov­ery became a con­sol­i­da­tion exer­cise:

• Sur­face every­thing. Gath­ered every wish and frus­tra­tion across the team.
• Turn it into direc­tion. Trans­lat­ed those into con­crete goals and mea­sures.
• A vision to work towards. Shaped a tan­gi­ble pic­ture of the future work­space to align on and present to man­age­ment.

“You think it’s all clear and sim­ple (at the begin­ning of the project). And then you realise the com­plex­i­ty (and chaos) dur­ing the project. That’s frus­trat­ing at first, but in the end it’s a great suc­cess to recog­nise that and a clear path to tack­le it.” — JM

Build & Iterate

Rather than hand over a fin­ished work­space, we built and released it in stages — each lay­er refined before the next.

• Staged roll­out. Core first (projects and tasks), then CRM and a knowl­edge base. Releas­ing grad­u­al­ly also sharp­ened the require­ments: see­ing how it looked and worked, the team could spot where it need­ed more nuance.
• CRM migra­tion. Moved the con­tact data off scat­tered Excel lists into a sin­gle CRM.
• Access as a pro­gres­sion. User groups named after dog breeds (Mops → Pudel → Labrador → Dogge), so access grows with a per­son­’s con­fi­dence in the tool rather than their job title.
• Clear record own­er­ship. Every project, con­tact and process has a sin­gle own­er — only they can edit the record or bring in co-work­ers. This makes respon­si­bil­i­ty unam­bigu­ous and, using Notion’s data­base row per­mis­sions (released Sep­tem­ber 2025), con­trols exact­ly who can change any giv­en record — a capa­bil­i­ty we’d been wait­ing for since 2021.
• Enter­prise, cho­sen delib­er­ate­ly. We moved MPS onto the Enter­prise plan for two rea­sons: the depth of ana­lyt­ics it unlocks, and the abil­i­ty to host the work­space on EU servers (Frank­furt, Ger­many) so the set­up com­plies with the com­pa­ny’s data reg­u­la­tions.

“More struc­ture, which also helps to dis­trib­ute work to oth­ers, cre­ate relief, and safe­guard things.” — DS

Enable & Launch

Enable­ment worked on two lev­els: get­ting peo­ple con­fi­dent in the tool, and build­ing a sys­tem that keeps teach­ing and self-cor­rect­ing after we’ve gone.

• Phased walk-throughs. Every release shipped with walk-through videos.
• A 70+ les­son train­ing library. Split into pure Notion train­ing (learn­ing the tool) and OS train­ing (how to use this spe­cif­ic work­space).
• A work­space mas­cot — Wal­ter Wuff. The CEO’s dog, turned into the onboard­ing and train­ing guide. The idea comes from Sys­temS­mart’s own mas­cot, Tru­di Truf­fle (more at truditruffle.rocks), cus­tomised here for MPS. New join­ers get a task from Wal­ter to com­plete a min­i­mum set of lessons, tracked on a leader­board that turned learn­ing into friend­ly team com­pe­ti­tion.
• Data qual­i­ty, guard­ed. Wal­ter Wuff dou­bles as a data-qual­i­ty man­ag­er: he flags entries below a min­i­mum stan­dard and points out what to fix, and awards a green 🐾 paw­proofed badge when an entry pass­es — all backed by a work­space health dash­board that charts qual­i­ty over time.
• Fric­tion­less sup­port — Wuff Tick­et. A cus­tom agent that lets any­one raise a sup­port tick­et by tag­ging Wal­ter Wuff on any page; the admin picks it up and answers, so no one breaks their work­flow to fill in a form.

“Final­ly a place that can be the home for our data foun­da­tion.” — HW

Refine

The final stretch is about peo­ple, not fea­tures.

• Poster-child coach­ing. The project team becomes the inter­nal ref­er­ence point for every­one else ahead of the wider roll­out, with one-to-one coach­ing to tai­lor Notion to how each per­son actu­al­ly works.
• AI, with guardrails. The next lay­er rolls out Notion AI on guardrails, plus skills and cus­tom agents to make the day-to-day smoother.

The sys­tem is built and in dai­ly use. What stands today:

• A sin­gle dai­ly view. Tasks and projects in one place, so the team sees what’s on their plate each day.
• Con­nect­ed clients. Every­thing linked to the CRM — one click shows what’s hap­pen­ing for a giv­en artist or band, instead of open­ing any num­ber of sep­a­rate sheets and spread­sheets.
• Struc­tured intake. A form cap­tures project requests and artist-sup­port needs. Pre­vi­ous­ly these came as emails and oper­a­tions rarely had the full pic­ture; now, on sub­mis­sion, an automa­tion vets the request and auto-cre­ates a project once it’s approved.
• A gat­ed process library. A clear method for writ­ing play­books and process descrip­tions keeps the process data­base from becom­ing a free-for-all — qual­i­ty stays high from the start, with clear own­er­ship. Once Notion AI is enabled, we’ll build Skills that rate these play­books.
• A liv­ing train­ing library. Built and ready to use.

“Clar­i­ty, and less email clut­ter on projects worked on by sev­er­al peo­ple.” — SS

With the foun­da­tion in place, the roadmap moves from run­ning the busi­ness to mea­sur­ing and scal­ing it:

• A report­ing sys­tem to mea­sure each artist’s suc­cess across live gigs and merch sales — a pilot is already in place.
• Ded­i­cat­ed por­tals for every artist, so they can see what’s hap­pen­ing for them and what’s on their plate to com­plete.
• Goal-set­ting and per­for­mance mea­sure­ment with OKRs, feed­ing off that report­ing.

The first task was to build a cen­tralised struc­ture so the team could work in a stan­dard­ised way on tasks and projects. In the Opera Mod­el, this is a Musi­cian prob­lem: they are all great musi­cians, but they aren’t in tune with each oth­er. Giv­ing them struc­ture — clear buck­ets where every­thing has its place — lets them play in tune.

Once that har­mo­ny is reached through how the musi­cians work, we can turn to the Score: the process-doc­u­men­ta­tion chal­lenge. A shared project and task struc­ture sur­faces pat­terns, and those pat­terns become the play­books and process doc­u­men­ta­tion that make up the score. And once the score is writ­ten, it opens a fur­ther oppor­tu­ni­ty — automa­tion that spins up new projects and their tasks in a sin­gle click, and far rich­er con­text for Notion AI to work from.