Among the prerequisites for improved effectiveness and efficiencies in governance are policy designs that clearly specify what is required, permitted, and forbidden on topics ranging from regulation to government contracting. One of the enduring challenges in understanding policy designs is the lack of effective tools for identifying and analyzing its content. This panel explores the puzzle of understanding the content of policy designs through the application of the Institutional Grammar Tool, originally created by Elinor Ostrom and Sue Crawford (1995). This panel will be the first to feature a set of papers that seek to sharpen the analytical precision and widen the general applicability of the institutional grammar tool for dissecting policies to improve processes of regulation, implementation, and contracting.