It sounds like you referenced a parent in your POM. That is, you pom.xml has a <parent> section. If you do that, the parent artifact must be of package type "pom".
Maven supports two different POM hierarchies:
One is the master/subproject hierarchy. In this hierarchy you have a master POM that, when you run a build, will also build submodules. This hierarchy is defined by placing a <modules> entry into the master POM. The mast and submodule POMs can use any packaging type. Example: a master POM with packaging type of "ear" might have submodules of type "jar" (for an
EJB project) and "war" (for the web app project).
The other is the parent/child hierarchy. In this hierarchy the parent defines a common build structure (plugins, dependencies, properties, etc) that is then used by one of more child projects. This hierarchy is defined by placing a <parent> entry into the child POM. In this case the parent POM must use a packaging type of "pom" because that POM doesn't define any artifact other than itself. Example: you might have a parent POM that defines all of the typical things that you need in yoru environment to build a
JSF web apps, this would include the
JSP library, perhaps some javascript libraries,
JUnit, plugins that define the WAR contents, etc, etc. Then each individual JSP web app would reference that parent POM (thus inheriting all of its app definition), and would then need to define very few things. (At work we make extensive use of parent POMs so that every artifact of a specific kind is built exactly the same way; in addition most of our specific POMs for an app have almost no information in them except for maybe some additional dependencies - we end up with very short POMs)
At work I constantly preach against people confusing the two hierarchies (lost of example on the web mix the two hierarchies thus adding to the confusion). My recommendation is to never use the master/submodule hierarchy - if you need that build it into
Jenkins. But use the parent/child relationship everywhere that you can; it significant reduces rework (I wholly support the DRY principle - Don't Repeat Yourself).
The free online book
Maven: The Definitive Guide has a good explanation of the two hierarchies.