Project organizations are required to continuously improve the quality of their projects in terms of cost, schedule and technical performance; but the economic return of projects is eradicated by poor quality in project planning and execution.  Project managers have the responsibility to implement learning processes such as benchmarking and lessons learned to move towards continual improvement and effective knowledge management if they wish to remain competitive.  This paper presents the design of a lessons learned system for the Quality Management and Business Excellence Department of Eskom, the largest utility in South Africa, towards an effective knowledge management system and a continual learning organization.  Benchmarking was employed as the tool to identify the required characteristics of six global lessons learned systems; and these characteristics then served as input to the user requirements specification and functional design of the lessons learned system for Eskom.  The paper concludes with recommendations for improvement of the system.