Ricardo Acto has led City of Rock operations for around 3 years, working daily to get the event off the ground in Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, Madrid and Las Vegas. After 12 years in the construction industry and in public positions, he was invited to join the festival team in 2007. Simultaneously, he led projects such as the Christmas Tree in Romania and in Lisbon, until he was promoted to VP of Operations for Rock in Rio in 2015.
His degree in engineering and his professional experience opened the door to the challenge he now faces. In Portugal alone, in this latest edition, it was necessary to scale the City of Rock to welcome 85,000 people, with the help of around 10,000 employees. Therefore, upon accepting the new position, the need to know even more about project and people management became evident.
Ricardo Acto found in the 1st edition of the Applied Project Management programme , in 2017, some of the tools he still uses in his day-to-day life. During a guided tour behind the scenes of the City of Rock, we filmed his testimony about the two-day course, coordinated by José Crespo de Carvalho:
Speaking about his particular experience, as operations manager of a large event, Ricardo shares that "it was positive to see that the challenges I face in a large organisation are, after all, more common than one might think", emphasising also the practical and objective side of the programme.
