Have you used any out of the box techniques to gather customer requirements?

After being patch up the POC of the client for requirements, I used to visit the current environment of client premise and engage with real end users with prior permission from client engagement department to know what are the bottlenecks they face from a solution and what they expect. Once requirements start to bake, a traceabiliity matrix will be prepared with current proposal from client for the solution with any new concepts which can be brought from the discussion from real end users.

A meeting will be held with the customer team to focus on scope and out of scope items which was discussed before and finalised so that customer can revise the requirements. This meeting will be differently conducted being a host which is my OUT OF BOX idea which worked multiple times. I will be drafting a story on behalf of customer requirements which will end up in one way or other in some placess where requirements was out of scope or was never discussed. As humans, everyone loves to hear a story which is not BORING but short and crisp to the point. This wil make to imagine a real time person and his pains due to any requirements. 

Inorder to ensure none of the requirement is missed out. Below technique will be helpful, 

1. Schedule meeting session with customer to gather unclear requirement. 

2.Consolidate the requirement as Functional and Non-Functional requirement and signed off from customer.

3. Clearly specify Scope and Out of Scope of requirement. 

I've built requirement matrixes in excell to ensure that all testing covers each requirement. It's not rocket science, but some testing on Ethernet & wireless links require soe clever testing approaches because instruments to perform thetest may not yet exist. Writing containers for these test is an alternative to the test bed.