The status of a task should automatically change to In Progress when I user decides to work on it and selects that button in My Work Requests. At least allow to have that functionality in setup to turn on and off.
I know that I am a bit late to the game on this topic, but . . .
The "Done" button will change a task status to "Complete", but the "Work On It" button in both the Home and Task areas does not change the task status to "In Progress". Ultimately, this is confusing to users as they believe they are acknowledging to the system that work has commenced and yet the task does not reflect that until the status is changed to "In Progress". Also, since the "Work On It" button does not change status to "In Progress" and the setting of "Actual Start Date" is triggered from the task status changing to "In Progress", data loss/accuracy becomes a problem and can lead to inaccuracies in the "Projected Completion Date". If you connect one interaction (Done to Complete) for consistency shouldn't you connect the other ("Work On It" to "In Progress")?
As to Mark Moroz's comment from a year ago, if a workflow is routing to multiple people (I assume based on Group, Team, or Role affiliation?) shouldn't there be an "I Got This" button to establish task ownership and then a "Work On It" to acknowledge commencement of work activities?
Definitely frustrating. "Work on it" should handle the status change, kind of like the "Done" button does. A consistent user experience would help enforce good process behaviors.
This is a feature we are researching and may add to the roadmap. However, we don't have cycles to add it in the next 12 months, which is why the status is "Not Planned".
The reason we don't currently automatically change the status when a user selects "Work on it" is because it impacts reporting when users click "Work on it" as soon as they receive each item instead of when they actually start working on the item.
Allowing this to be functionality that could be turned on or off in Setup would be super helpful.
With users assuming the task starts when they click that they are working on it, similar to the task completing when they click Done, there's no way to reliably pull data on how long a task took.
How has this not been handled? A "Sign me up" type of feature button to assign oneself to a task and a "Get Started" type of button seems simple enough. Tons of votes for this one - what's going on??? I'm not even sure that it really needs to be configurable if users were provided with a two-button and/or two-step, intuitive interface that shows the user what the results of their actions are.
This functionality would help make the Actual Start and Actual Duration fields more reliable as well, since (at least from what I've seen about actual user behavior), users aren't updating their percent complete unless it's 100% because they finished the task, nor are they manually going in and changing the status to In Progress...
I hope this can be green-lit sooner than later, as it would help with reporting immensely.
