Parent POM is called a BOM in Maven, you can put it anywhere so long as you define modules inside it, which will have their own poms. Example
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
<modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
<groupId>myorg</groupId>
<artifactId>Myorg BOM</artifactId>
<version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
<packaging>pom</packaging>
<name>Myorg BOM</name>
<modules>
<module>location/of/module1</module>
<module>location/of/module2</module>
<module>location/of/module3</module>
</modules>
...
Then you just create a POM for each individual component in the path provided in module. You can create this inside an eclipse project.