Ricardo Acto has been leading the operations of the City of Rock for about 3 years, working daily to get the event up and running in Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, Madrid, and Las Vegas. After 12 years in construction and public office, he was invited to join the festival team in 2007. At the same time, he led projects such as the Christmas Tree in Romania and Lisbon, until he was promoted to Operations VP of Rock in Rio in 2015.
His engineering degree and professional experience have opened the door to the challenge he now faces. In Portugal alone, in this last edition, it was necessary to scale the City of Rock to receive 85,000 people, with the help of about 10,000 employees. Therefore, by accepting the new position, it became obvious the need to know even more about project and people management.
Ricardo Acto found in the 1st edition of the Project Management Intensive Program, in 2017, some of the tools he still uses today. During a behind-the-scenes tour of the City of Rock, we filmed his testimony about the two-day course, coordinated by José Crespo de Carvalho:
Speaking of his particular experience as operations manager for a large event, Ricardo shares that "it was positive to see that the challenges I face in a large organization are more common than previously thought," emphasizing the practical and objective approach of the program.