Maven, to use or not to use

I have looked at Maven as a possible approach to standardise the way I work with projects in the past, and have thought it has a great deal of promise, but two things have held me back from working with it... time, and some negative reviews from people I respect in the software development circles.

Now I am working in a small company, where in between projects there is scope to work on improving project platforms, engine rooms etc, and there is definitely scope to improve reuse of code. Added to this I am sick of checking jar files to source control, it seems a bit pointless.

So I grabbed myself a PDF to read through, and intend to beef up on Mavenesque ways over the next few weeks, lets see how it goes.

I will report back in a while.

Goes quiet, pondering, where's my cup of tea?