How to use properties-maven-plugin?

Official answer from them is that using read-project-properties for setting version of dependencies is not supported: https://github.com/mojohaus/properties-maven-plugin/issues/26

This does not work nor is it the intention of properties maven plugin and furthermore what would be the advantage to read properties from a file to define versions of dependencies?

There is a very through explanation about this issue on this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/14727072/1707491

Make sure that you have ${basedir}/my.properties file present with that specific property value pair: my.properties contents should be: prop1=2.3