An alternate approach for setting up dependencies (and the one used that is used in the archetype) is to have the xxx-jpa-service module inherit from org.starobjects.jpa:release rather than the parent module. Or, you could perhaps have the parent module inherit from org.starobjects.jpa:release. Doing it this way means that it isn't necessary to add entries to <dependencyManagement> because they are inherited. However, Maven2 does only allow a single parent, so this may not be an option for you if you want to use some other POM as your parent.